Panforte: a sophisticated alternative to Christmas cake

If you’re looking for an alternative to Christmas cake (or an addition to it), then panforte is the bake for you. Sufficiently similar to our traditional Christmas cake in its flavours of Medieval spice, dried fruit and candied citrus that it can’t fail to evoke the Christmas spirit, it is still entirely distinctive. Panforte is shallower than Christmas cake, and more solid; the honey in the mix means that it is chewy rather than crumbly, and where a Christmas cake is stuffed full of vine fruits and cherries, panforte majors in dates and figs. A slim wedge of the dense, spiced bake is more than sufficient and even, whisper it, more elegant than our homegrown Christmas cake.

Appropriately, given its provenance, its flavours and chewiness are reminiscent of a florentine: the cake comes from Siena, Florence’s neighbour, and is an old Tuscan cake which probably began life as a spiced bread. The first reference to it is from 1205, where it is described as a honey and pepper bread, which was paid as a tithe to a Sienese monastery. As spices reached Italy from the East, they were incorporated into the cake, but their rarity and expense marked panforte out as something reserved for the rich, and even then only for important occasions – which is probably how it came to be associated with Christmas.

The original panforte was darker than the modern day version, and would be made with black candied melon (‘candito nero di Ponone’) which, even in Tuscany, is extremely difficult to come by today. But since the nineteenth century, a lighter version has been made, the panforte Margherita is named after Margherita di Savoia, Queen of Italy from 1878. This version, which has become the standard Sienese panforte doesn’t require the black candied melon.

It’s a delightfully straightforward cake to make – much easier than panettone, quicker than christmas cake, and significantly less faffy than steaming a christmas pud (much as I love all of these treats) – but will keep just as long as any of them, and evoke the same amount of spiced christmas spirit.