PANDORO SANTA HATS

This is just a quick idea of something cute and Christmassy to make for Christmas parties or get-togethers.  I had some friends coming round to mine last weekend and as always at Christmas, I had a pandoro in my kitchen. If you don’t know what a pandoro is, its an Italian sweet bread, more like a sponge cake. It is incredibly light and soft and oh so buttery, I love it. Its usually served sprinkled with vanilla scented icing sugar and it is absolutely delicious.

Anyway, I always have one in my house at Christmas. Last weekend, I wanted to make something small and sweet for my friends to eat so I decided to be resourceful with my pandoro. I decided to make some small cakes out of it. I had a tub of mascarpone in the fridge and a punnet of strawberries so I thought I’d made some santa hat cakes.

So I cut a layer off the bottom of my pandoro, about 2cm thick, and used a cookie cutter to cut out small rounds of sponge.

In a mixing bowl I whisked some mascarpone with a tablespoon of icing sugar and a few drops of vanilla extract. Then to make it taste Christmassy I added some orange zest.

I simply spread some of the mascarpone mixture onto each sponge, added a single strawberry and piped a little mascarpone ‘bobble’ onto the the tip of each strawberry to make it look like Santa’s hat.

And they turned out to be delicious, not to mention incredibly quick and easy to make. You can of course tailor these in any way you like, you could add Grand Marnier to the mascarpone, or crushed toasted hazlenuts, you could do anything.

If you can’t get hold of a pandoro, you could always just bake a sponge and cut that out instead.