If you like, you can add dried fruit to the cake mixture, as well as cooked chestnuts. In addition, someone from Ferrara might use potato flour instead of wheat flour, making the ‘Tenerina’ even more impressive.

This cake was originally called ‘Queen Cake of Montenegro’. It was ‘invented’, in fact, during the early years of the twentieth century, when King Vittorio Emanuele III married Elena Petrovich, Princess of Montenegro. It was love at first sight, and he wanted to dedicate this cake to his beloved wife: a cake for the soft-hearted that then took on the name ‘Tenerina’ (‘softy’).