Now the days are getting shorter and Christmas time is coming my thoughts go to recipes of nutritious food in which lots of flavours are packed, conserved in such a way that the taste only improves with time. Many of you may know the famous British Christmas pudding that is traditionally prepared months before the Christmas celebration.

Perhaps fewer of you may know that in Italy, in Siena to be precise, they have their own heavenly Christmas cake with honey, spices, nuts and candied fruit: Panforte.

Here, I will present you with my recipe which will go perfectly with either cafè or with a good passito.

Ingredients (for about 8 persons)

• 225 g peeled almonds
• 100 g walnuts
• 50 g hazelnuts (take the Tonda Gentile delle Langhe variety form Piemonte if you can get hold of them, they taste by far the best)
• 100 g candied orange and/or lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ¼ teaspoon freshly grounded (in a mortar) coriander seeds
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
• ¼ teaspoon ground mace
• about 100 g flour (preferably Italian 00)
• 275 g honey (acacia would be fine)
• 75 g sugar

“Tools”

• baking sheets
• 20 cm diameter springform

For decoration

• powder sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix with a wooden spoon the nuts and candied orange peel with half of the cinnamon, the coriander, the white pepper and the mace. Add 75 g of the flour.

Pour the honey in a pan, slowly heat it on the stove and dissolve the sugar in the honey. Poor the honey mixture in the bowl containing the nuts and spices. Mix well with the wooden spoon. The mixture should have the consistency of a very sticky paste. It should not be like a thick liquid, in that case you should add some flour.

Now cover the sides and the bottom of the springform with bakingsheet and fill the springform with the mixture. Wet your hands a little bit and push the mixture down in the springform to get rid of large pockets of air. Flatten the surface a bit and coat it with a thin layer of a mix of the remaining flour and cinnamon.

Cook the Panforte for about 35 minutes in an oven preheated at about 180 Celsius. When you take it out of the oven it will still be relatively soft. Open the springform after about 15 minutes and fully cool down the Panforte on a tray for some 8 hours.

If you want to keep the Panforte till Christmas you need to wrap it first in fat-free paper and then in aluminum foil. You can keep it for at least two months.

Before serving the Panforte you dust it with powder sugar. For cutting it you use the largest knife you have and use that as a lever.

Buon Natale!