Canberra kitchen gardener Rosie Stevens shares her panforte recipe

It was Rosie Stevens of Woollahra who pointed out to me the bee plaque at the National Arboretum (Kitchen Garden, July 15). She was in Canberra for the Open Gardens Australia announcement of the first Gallery of Gardens on site as she has been on the OGA committee for a decade and her own garden was open for the scheme in May this year. We had just met over lunch when bees had been discussed.

Rosie Stevens says she was fortunate to be born into a family with great passion for gardening. They lived on the Snowy River downstream from Jindabyne where her father, Bruce Monckton, grew carrots and potatoes for the troops during WWII. They had a vegetable garden and large orchard along the banks of the river and beehives on the property gave them honeycomb.

Rosie was home schooled until the age of nine as they lived about 100 kilometres out of Cooma she grew up helping to milk the cow every morning before Correspondence School and, in the afternoons, helped by watering the vegetable and flower gardens or driving a tractor for haymaking.

When she was 12, following the building of Jindabyne Dam, her family moved to her grandparents' property "El Paso", established in 1927 on the Murrumbidgee River at Bredbo. She helped her mother establish another vegetable garden.

After attending Mary White's School of Art in Sydney, Rosie worked at Studio 12 in Manuka where she developed a love of Marimekko and Arabia products. At that time she lived in a gardener's room in the middle of a vegetable garden in Red Hill. In 1968 she flew to London to work in interior design and studied at Cordon Bleu in Marylebone Lane.

After marrying Geoffrey Stevens, the couple lived in a large Victorian house in Annandale, Sydney. Her husband was importing Georgian silver at the time and they would have dinner parties and literally sell the silver from the table to selected guests. He was also running Camden Park Estate so they had fresh milk twice a week from the dairy. Rosie had a separator and made thick cream and butter.

After her husband died, Rosie moved to Woollahra with four children under nine years old. Once they were settled in schools she started making panforte commercially, delivering it to top delis across Sydney for more than a decade. She says different honeys make a huge difference to the taste. The year she sold the business Rosie made a tonne and a half of the 'strong bread' and she bought honey by the 27-kilogram drum.

Initially she was influenced by a panforte recipe from Stefano Manfredi but found, for Australian palates, it was a little too dry. In Manfredi's Italian Food (2013) he has a recipe for Siena spiced fruit and nut cake from Tuscany but his is not layered between rice paper.

A friend recently returned from a road trip to Western Australia brought back nut cake from the New Norcia Bakeries which, since 1993, has used a wood-fired oven at the Benedictine monastery. It contains sultanas, raisins, native honeys, wheat flour, almonds "for integrity", hazelnuts "for courage", currants, pecans "for passion", as well as cocoa, mixed peel, cinnamon, pepper and milk. The handsome white box does not disclose which 'native honeys' are used but Bartholomews Meadery honey from Denmark, WA, is superb quality and includes Jarrah Wandoo, Wildflower and a darker honey called Coastal Heath.

A Canberra kitchen gardener makes panforte for his family and friends every Christmas and he uses Stephanie Alexander's recipe, which includes Dutch cocoa and bittersweet chocolate.

Rosie has made a rich chocolate panforte which had red cherries, couverture Belgian chocolate and citron in it but, for us, she shares her preferred recipe.

Rosie's panforte

1.5kg dried fruit – mixture of apricots, prunes, pears, sultanas, figs, peel
1.2kg mixed roasted nuts – almonds, pistachio, macadamia, hazelnuts
500g plain flour – slightly less if you like a moist panforte, also less of using gluten free flour
1 tbsp each of ground cinnamon and mixed spice
650g sugar – white or raw
650g honey – Leatherwood, ironbark or citrus flowers
10 sheets rice paper (approx)

Line two trays (36x26cm) base and sides with rice paper. Mix roasted nuts and dried fruit together. Sift flour and spices into the mixture. In a saucepan, dissolve the honey and sugar then bring to soft ball stage (116C).

Add immediately to the fruit nut mix using a wooden spoon (work quickly before it cools). Spoon mixture into tins carefully, not moving the rice paper, press down once it is evenly distributed and cover with another sheet of rice paper.

Bake in a preheated 150C oven for 20 minutes. Allow to cool before removing from trays. Store in an air-tight container. Cut into small slices and dust with icing sugar to serve.

Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.