Eight points narrowing toward the top, soft buttery dough, no filling: just a dusting of vanilla-scented icing sugar, to look like a snow-capped peak. It grew out of the levà veronese, a simpler leavened cake, from which Melegatti removed the sugar-and-almond topping and added butter and eggs, making it richer.
On 14 October 1894 Domenico Melegatti filed the cake's patent in Verona; the star shape, which cuts into slices with a distinctive outline, was designed by the impressionist painter Angelo Dall'Oca Bianca. Melegatti offered a cash prize to anyone who could reproduce his recipe: nobody ever won it.
Today pandoro is a Traditional Agri-food Product of Veneto, with a production zone in the province of Verona, and is eaten above all at Christmas, often alongside Milan's panettone.
