Chestnut Cake with Chocolate & Saffron Whipped Cream
Every year I see chestnuts in the store at Christmas time, and I long to make something with a food so traditional and romantic. Who can resist the warm brown shininess? But I had never done it. The phrases “traditional food of the woodland people” —read: something you would only eat if you were starving— and “excellent for provisioning fortresses” —mmm, need I say more? —always stopped me dead in my tracks. Also, chestnuts roasting on an open fire sounds to me like the second best way to put your eye out over the holidays, after a Daisy BB gun. But people do not write sentimental Christmas songs about a food that’s not very good, do they? So I decided to take the plunge.
The next hurdle was the fact that the best-known Italian dessert recipe with chestnuts, the Mont Blanc, uses the word “ring mold” in the opening line. I do not cook things in ring molds, or any recipe that begins, “Three days before the meal, lead the goat to a quiet and secure place.” So I invented a cake that uses liberal quantities of chestnuts and pairs their unique sweet flavor with two of their old favorite companions—chocolate and saffron. I even baked it in a Bundt pan, so it has the round shape and snow-capped peaks of Mont Blanc and its neighbors.
The big time-consumer in this recipe is preparing the chestnuts. You can soak them overnight and boil for 2 hours as the traditional instructions go. I pressure cooked mine, letting them cook for 40 minutes after the rocker began its rhythmic thumping and hissing. Once the chestnuts were cool enough to handle, I peeled them. This took an hour. Chestnuts are basically a little motorcycle jacket with a fuzzy sweater under it, and inside that is the little tan chestnut meat. It looks like a brain, but instead of using its folds to think harder, it uses them to stick to the fuzzy sweater layer. Chestnuts are easier to peel if you cut the end off where they were attached to the tree (that flat little pad), then turn the motorcycle jacket inside out and let the nut meat fall out into a bowl. If you have been a very good person, every fifth or sixth one will pop out whole. Just make sure no bits of jacket or sweater end up in the cake. They will not soften during baking.
Once the nuts are ready, the cake goes together in the usual fashion. Be sure to butter the pan well, because the batter is very sticky. Chestnut Cake looks a bit like an applesauce cake while it’s baking, but when you slice it, you see the crumbles of chestnut. The flavor of the nuts—sweet and earthy without the acrid taste of some other nuts—plays well with the bittersweet chocolate. And the saffron seems to take the chestnut flavor an octave higher. This is a pretty dramatic dessert—the Alps on the dinner table—and a slice makes you understand why people are still singing about the chestnut.
RECIPE: Chestnut Cake with Chocolate & Saffron Whipped Cream
