These traditional Italian Christmas cookies were originally invented in Siena. They have a soft texture and consist of flour, nuts, candied fruit, and various spices. Originally, cavallucci were prepared without nuts or candied fruit – only flour, sugar, honey, and anise seeds were used.
The name is believed to be a derivation of the word cavallo, meaning horse – this is either a reference to their shape, which is reminiscent to a horse hoof, or because they were imprinted with a tiny horse on top in the past.
MOST ICONIC Cavallucci
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Panforte di Siena is a traditional dessert also known as Siena cake. The modern panforte variety is made with nuts, dried fruit, and a generous amount of spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. All of the ingredients are combined with a sugary syrup, usually made with butter, sugar, and honey, and the cake is generously dusted with powdered sugar.
This mixture of ingredients forms an unusual and dense cake with a firm structure and an interesting flavor combination. Believed to have originated in the 13th century in Siena, a city in central Tuscany, it has become an indispensable part of traditional Italian confectionery production.
MOST ICONIC Panforte di Siena
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A typical dessert of Sienese cuisine, ricciarelli di Siena are soft almond biscuits whose origins date back to the 14th century. According to a popular legend, they were named after a Sienese nobleman Ricciardetto Della Gherardesca, who brought similar lozenge-shaped Arab sweets to Siena upon his return from the Crusades.
Back then, these cookies were also known as marzapanetti alla Senese or morzelletti, and they were reserved for the lavish banquets and feasts of Tuscan royalty, since almond paste or marzipan was a precious and expensive ingredient sold only in Renaissance apothecaries along with the most exotic spices of the time.
MOST ICONIC Ricciarelli di Siena
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Malfatti (Siena) or gnudi (lit. naked, Florence) are typical of Sienese cuisine, but it's believed that they probably originated in Northern Italy. These spinach gnocchi are made by hand, and due to the fact that they are not uniform in shape or size, they're called malfatti, meaning badly made.
They are made with a combination of cooked spinach, a pinch of salt, butter, ricotta, eggs, nutmeg, parmesan cheese, and a binding agent such as flour, semolina, or breadcrumbs. Once the mixture becomes smooth, it's shaped into small balls that are rolled in flour before being boiled.
MOST ICONIC Malfatti
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