'Twas the night before Bake Off, when all through the house,
one baker was stirring, cocoa all over her blouse.
The parchment was lined in the cake pan with care,
in hopes that the batter would soon be in there.
When out of the oven sounded such a loud bang,
that the bowl nearly fell to the floor with a clang!
Away to the oven I flew like a flash,
threw open the door and had all my hopes dashed.
A great wave of heat rushed up into my eyes,
yet not from that sprung the tears, but from the surprise.
The walls of the oven showed I was a clutz:
splattered bits everywhere, in place of chestnuts.
I apologize, I don't know what happened there. I need to get out more. As is probably now clear, despite hearing Nat King Cole croon about chestnuts annually, I had next to zero familiarity with the shiny brown nuts prior to my blowing them up. What possessed me, then, to want to bake a chestnut coffee cake, I do not know. It was, in fact, the night of the Bake Off finale in early October, but I was already feeling a touch of holiday spirit. So when I saw Bon Appétite's recipe for Chestnut Coffee Cake earlier on in the day, it grabbed my attention. Never mind that I didn't know how to handle chestnuts, it couldn't be that hard, right?
I bought some lovely-looking nuts from the local market and took them home to get started. The recipe calls for nuts in a vacuum-pack or a jar, but while I'd seen some in a can in the grocery store I hadn't seen any others. Since fresh ones were available I thought they'd be best, plus I wanted to try roasting them first (not called for in the recipe) and wasn't sure about trying to roast chestnuts which had already been peeled, such as those in the can. What I didn't think about was the possibility of rotten nuts. Or blowing them up.
Of course, I knew the scoring of the nuts, as directed by BBC Food, was to allow for expansion; I expected the skins to open up, but for some reason it never occurred to me that they might start popping like popcorn. So I scored them and put them in the oven to roast, uncovered. The bang like the shot of a gun in the corner of the kitchen caught me totally off guard, and the mess inside... it wasn't pretty. Only one nut had burst, but it had done so with gusto, coating the entire inside of the oven - top, bottom and sides - with a soft powder of chestnut guts.
I pulled the hot roasting pan from the oven and let the nuts cool while I aired out and cleaned out the oven. By the time that was finished and I was no longer worried about any of the remaining chestnuts exploding in my face, I investigated them. Some seemed ready to be peeled, but a number of them were discoloured inside. I'd happened upon advice in another recipe to over-buy chestnuts because they often have rotten centres. Without knowing what exactly a rotten centre looked like, or how to tell if my chestnuts were bad, I ran out and bought the canned variety. It's never worth risking making people sick, and this cake wasn't just for me.
The canned variety come suspended in some sort of thick liquid, so I rinsed them off and then stuck them in to roast very very briefly before chopping them up. The chopped nuts are then (or first, if you skip the roasting) cooked in a skillet with water and brown sugar to make a syrup. The recipe calls for a half-cup of chestnuts, but I believe I might actually have gone a little crazy with the chestnut chopping (revenge therapy for the chestnut exploding?) and ended up using a full cup; if so I would also have doubled the water and sugar, as well as the cocoa and remaining sugar for coating.
There were a lot of nuts. I let those cool while making the streusel topping. This, unlike the nut fiasco, was very straightforward: simply mix almond meal, sugar, flour and salt and work the chunks of butter into it with your hands. The cake recipe itself is very easy and fairly standard, with the inclusion of sour cream. After the batter was made, I worked pretty quickly to get half of it in the pan and then to crumble a layer of the cocoa-coated chestnuts over it before topping it off with the second half of the batter and finally the streusel.
The recipe says to sprinkle the chestnuts over the first layer of batter, but mine were pretty sticky and thick, and not really sprinkle material... I also had twice the amount, so rather than a chestnut here and a chestnut there, I wound up with an entire layer's worth. In the end I quite liked it that way.
Unfortunately, even after my fallen cake and my flooded cake, I was still adjusting to my new oven (I still am, in fact), and one side got a little to near to the flame in the back. Open fires, huh? So it was singed and certainly wouldn't have won me any star baker accolades, but it was far from inedible. Having had, as I mentioned, no previous experience with chestnuts I was surprised to find that they were meaty, but they really do work with the chocolate and the somewhat crumbly spongy texture of the coffee cake. It was good for enjoying with friends (and their goodies!) during the finale of Bake Off, and a leftover slice was equally tasty with coffee the next morning.
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