Chestnut cake with chocolate
Unique, suggestive, and irresistible. This is what the chestnut cake with chocolate is.
If you like chestnut, you should definitely try it. It’s not a muffin or a dry cake even though it looks like it.
components
- 65 gr of chestnut flour (you can use any sharp flour as a substitute)
- 65 gr of white flour
- 30 gr of orange juice (1,5 orange)
- 100 gr marzipan (store-bought)
- 150 gr of chestnuts (or chestnut puree)
- 100 gr of butter
- 3 eggs
- 75 gr of sugar
- 1 baking powder
- 30 gr of sweet cream (room temperature)
- CHOCOLATE TOPPING (bigger measure):
- 250 ml of sweet cream
- 4-5 spoons of cocoa
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla flavour
- 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar
- 30 gr of butter
- 270 gr of dark chocolate
- dry and stone fruit for decoration
Instruction
- Heat up the oven at 190°C. In a separate bowl, mix together marzipan (previously cut into smaller pieces), sugar, and chestnut.
- Gradually add butter and whisked eggs to that mixture.
- Then, add sifted flour, mixed with baking powder and orange juice. All the ingredients should be mixed well and sweet cream at room temperature added.
- Coat the moulds with butter. Bake in the heated oven for about 40 minutes.
- While the cake is baking, we are preparing the chocolate topping.
- Warm up the sweet cream, vanilla favour, powdered sugar and cocoa in a pot.
- Once the mixture reaches 100°C, it should be taken off the stove and poured over chocolate. Stir until the chocolate melts.
- At the end, add butter and take the hand blender and mix everything to be without bubbles and lumps.
- Once the cakes are baked, take them out of the moulds and pour the chocolate over while they are still warm.
- I decorated the cake with dry fruit and nuts. While serving, I put the chocolate topping under and over the cake. Altogether, the cake was amazing!
- ENJOY!
This is because of the mould I baked it in.
A bit of storytelling before the cake
By the way, I found the recipe for this cake in one of the dozens of books I brought home from France. What’s interesting is how I got to this book.
In the backyard in Paris, where I lived, there was a tradition to not throw away old stuff, including clothes, books, furniture, food, if it was well-preserved. Instead, we would leave them on the concrete under the mailbox. If someone needs those stuff, they would just take it. This was much better than ending up in a dumpster.
Someone would even leave a book or two. And some of them were culinary books, which was perfect for me! This is how I got to some of them. Nobody needed them, and they meant a lot to me.
So, our chestnut cake had a long way to go – from the exchange in Paris to our bellies. Of course, the recipe was just an inspiration, because it had to be adapted to our local, Serbian conditions and tastes.
Chestnut cake
The ingredients you need for this beauty are marzipan, chestnut, oranges, chocolate, sweet whole fat cream. It would be great if you had chestnut flour, but even if you don’t, you can use the regular flour (sharp).
If you need chestnut and flour, and you don’t know where to buy them, I found them for you. You can call here. This is the most famous pastry shop in town that has everything chestnut.
Let’s get back to the photogenic beauty…
It’s best to pour chocolate over this cake. I mixed the chocolate ganache from dark chocolate, cocoa, sweet cream. I made it all in quantity larger than I actually needed for this cake.
In fact, I wouldn’t even call it ganache, but chocolate topping. It goes well with crepes, banana bread or dry cakes. I mean, what can I tell you, I ate it with a spoon.
What you need to know is that chestnut flour does not have much gluten, so if you make the cake with just chestnut flour it won’t be so fluffy. So, it’s best to mix it with regular flour for cakes that definitely has more gluten than chestnut flour.
For me, this cake is ideal for tea and coffee and completely covered in chocolate topping.
I couldn’t stop at one, I kept taking more and more…
As for making it, there are no special demands, so we can jump right to the recipe.
