"Chest-nuts burst-ing, all over the ovennnn..."

'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.

... And Then the Flood

Continuing in the spirit of Great British Bake Off-inspired experimentation, I moved from a cake without any chemical leavening agents to a cake without any chemical leavening agents and without any flour.  No flour!  That's right all you gluten-free people out there.  It is not that there is a flour-substitute in this cake - there isn't.  It is made only with chocolate, sugar, water, butter, eggs and coffee.  Some flourless chocolate cakes use similar ingredients but are treated almost as souffles, with soft peak egg whites folded into the batter to raise the cake.  This results in a 'fallen' look to the top of the cake when it cools.  This cake, however, is not really leavened at all.  Something akin to a mousse is made through combining melted chocolate, butter and sugar with beaten whole eggs and coffee.  It is not folded into anything, however, and no heavy cream or gelatin is involved.  The batter is simply poured into the prepared pan and baked in a bain-marie.

I say 'simply', and it generally is, but please take more care than I did - there will be less stress in the end.  In order to easily remove the cake after baking, I used a springform pan.  I used two springform pans actually: a 9" for the cake and an 11" for the bain-marie.  I took care to line the inside of the larger pan with foil so that the water would not leak out of it.  I did not, however, line the outside of the smaller pan to keep the water from leaking in...

Fold pieces of foil several times in the centre to waterproof.

I chose this recipe from Nick Malgieri, or rather was given it by my sister, because it was the nearest version either of us knew to the flourless chocolate cake that we used to decorate in the bakery.  I adapted it to fill a 9" pan instead of an 8", and this version can be found in the Recipe Box, along with the salted caramel and whisky sauce (see below).

If the chocolate does not melt, reheat gently over a double boiler.

While I'd seen the cakes baked many times, and eaten them many times, I'd never actually made any myself; hence the experimentation.  I did remember that the bakery used esspresso in the cakes, so I got a double shot and mixed that with enough pour-over coffee to make a 1/4 cup.  I did not, however, remember the more important piece of information...

Let the coffee cool before whipping it into the eggs.

As I was lowering the cake into the bain-marie, and giving it a bit of a push into the water (I didn't think it should float - another genius move) I had visions of peeling foil off of the bottoms of the flourless chocolate cakes in the bakery.  'That's odd...', I started to think in the split second before the water began to gurgle up with increasing speed between the edge of the batter and the inside of the pan, before another leak sprung and then another.  The top of the cake had flooded before I could finish cursing.

Temper the eggs with a little bit of chocolate before combining.

I poured the water out and off of the cake as best as I could, and proceeded to put it in the oven with fingers crossed.  The oven was having heating issues as well, of course, requiring to be set at Gas Mark 5 despite the desired temperature being a mere 300F (150C); fortunately I had purchased a thermometer that morning.¹

Whip it all together...

When the timer went off, I held my breath, opened the oven and pulled out a cake submerged under a small lake.  More cursing.  I very nearly had my own personal bingate!  Instead, when trying to tip the cake over the sink (not into the rubbish) I noticed that it was holding together, so I changed tack and soaked up the water with paper towels, covered the top where it was dark and would have been at risk of burning, and put it back in the oven.  However long it was in there in the end, I couldn't say, but I removed it for good when I thought that it seemed set and the top a bit dry.

Not too bad, in spite of the flood.

While the cake was cooling, I set to making salted caramel and whisky sauce to cover up any less aesthetically-pleasing aspects of the cake.  Salted caramel whisky sauce also has the added benefit, of course, of being utterly and totally delicious.  But you can leave it off if you like, your call.

I made this caramel once before, but in its original calvados incarnation in a recipe from BBC Food.  This time I substituted whisky and added about a 1/4 tsp of coarse Breton sea salt (for a very Celtic sauce, I suppose).  I thought that the sauce might have needed a bit of reheating before serving, but it was fine at room temperature.  If left in the refrigerator overnight, however, prepare for it to be spreadable.

Not bad for gluten-free.

¹ It really make me wonder what I baked the last three cakes at, though...

First Came the Fall...

The colours of the leaves are changing and there is a chill in the air.  The arrival of the Pumpkin Spice latte has been declaimed from every window of every Starbucks on every corner.  It's Autumn!  And though the Fall inspired this cake, unfortunately it wasn't the only kind involved in its making.

I've been watching too much Great British Bake Off (again) and as a direct result decided that I should challenge myself to make something other than my standard butter cakes for a layer cake that I was preparing for some friends' party.  I wanted to try a génoise cake, which is leavened with beaten eggs instead of baking powder and baking soda.  I also had a can of pumpkin lying around, and with the aforementioned arrival of Fall, I wanted to use it.  Happily, Williams-Sonoma had already beaten me to this combination, so I followed their recipes for both génoise cake and pumpkin mousse.  These are condensed in the Recipe Box.

I had to bake this cake twice.  The first time, the layer was pretty pancake-like; far too thin to be split.  The second attempt was far more successful.  The differences amount, I think, to the use of fresh eggs, the temperature at which the eggs are used, the degree to which they are beaten and the size of the tool used to fold the mixture.

Even though génoise is leavened with eggs, and the best eggs for whipping are fresh, I first unwisely elected to use some eggs that were perfectly safe but which had admittedly been in the fridge for awhile.  I also used them cold, straight out of that fridge, which may or may not have contributed to the failure of this layer.  For the génoise, the eggs are beaten whole with the sugar over a double boiler until they reach 140F (60C), or, for those of us without a candy thermometer, until the sugar is entirely dissolved.  They are then beaten on high until 'pale and tripled in volume'.  'Pale' may not be the best measurement, as I don't think the eggs had been whipped up enough to support the cake when I stopped at 'pale' the first time.  A better measurement is to stop when they hold a ribbon, which I later discovered Martha gives as one of her tips for this type of cake.

That is how far I beat the eggs the second time.  These eggs were also fresher and at room temperature when I used them.  Room temperature eggs create more volume, and therefore are likely to produce a better result in a cake in which they are the leavening agent.  The final important difference between the first cake and the second was the size of the folding tool.  The dry ingredients must be carefully folded into the beaten egg and sugar mix, and the wider the spatula the more effective each fold.  None of my spatulas are particularly wide, and with the first cake I could hear the bubbles in the batter popping with every turn of the bowl and twist of the spatula.  To try to minimize this damage, I used a cake scraper the second time.  While this was a bit messier because the scraper lacks a handle, it did work quite well.

The same recipe, same ingredients and same amounts produced twice the cake.  What a difference a little practice makes!  The third or fourth time might really have been the charm, but with enough cake for three layers I quit while I was ahead.

The pumpkin mousse was far less problematic, once I got past the complications of using leaf gelatine instead of powdered.  The recipe calls for 2 1/4 tsp or one sachet of powdered gelatine, which through using Nigella's conversion and some maths (which of course I did not write down) I calculated equals 3 1/3 leaves of Dr Oetker's platinum grade leaf gelatine.  I don't know if that's actually accurate, but that's how much I used and it worked just fine.

First set the gelatine to soak as directed on the packet, and then mix a 1/2 cup of the pumpkin puree with the sugar and salt in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.  Mix in the gelatine and let it cool to room temperature before mixing it into the remaining pumpkin and adding the spices.  I didn't have any rum, so I substituted a 1/2 tblsp molasses mixed with a 1/2 tblsp calvados in the hopes that this would approximate its sweet dark flavour.

Like the dry ingredients of the génoise getting folded into the beaten eggs, the pumpkin mixture gets folded into whipped cream.  Whip the cream to soft peaks in a large bowl, and use a large spatula (or a cake scraper) to fold the pumpkin mixture into it in thirds.

To set up the cake, the layers should be built up inside of the clean springform pan.  I used the first, denser cake layer as the base layer of the cake, and split the second layer to make a three-layer cake; the recipe was intended to be two layers, but why have less cake when you can have more?  For a little added punch and moisture, I drizzled the residue of the rum-substitute onto the middle layer.

The whole thing should then be left in the refrigerator for at least four hours, but as I was using the cake the next day, and wanted it to be very stable on its journey, I froze it.  To finish it off, pipe a whipped cream border before serving.

The pumpkin mousse essentially tasted like a light pumpkin pie - not a bad thing in my book.  It was very good paired with the lightness of the génoise, and added a bit of moisture.  The crowning achievement of the cake, however, or its most resounding endorsement, was one host's claim that there had never been so much success in getting Brits to eat pumpkin.  Still, I doubt they'll be queuing up at Starbucks for a Pumpkin Spice latte any time soon.