I brought a can of chestnut purée home from Montreal to Newfoundland along with my sezchuan peppercorns and dried Anaheim, New Mexico and bird’s eye chili peppers (these things are still hard to come by here, though at least the peppercorns may soon be available at Food For Thought on Duckworth Street. Ask and ye shall receive) and I was set on using all of them…not all in this one recipe, thank goodness…oh dear.
I mainly wanted to make this recipe because I had tried it in Montreal and failed rather miserably. It involves egg whites and I certainly don’t get along with those. Especially from eggs that had frozen a little in my fridge. They didn’t want to rise very much and when the cake came out, it immediately deflated. It was a crushing defeat.
It’s a beautiful recipe, though, from Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts. The chestnut purée is a traditional French ingredient, incredibly low in calories and with almost zero fat, often served on its own, direct from the can, sweetened, or with a dollop of cream. It is simple, refined and elegant (not if served DIRECTLY from the can to your plate in a restaurant). By adding it to a cake, you cut a lot of the fat and flour since the purée is moist but thick. Kind of like adding applesauce or fruit purées, but a much more savoury and unique flavour that you don’t necessarily want to cover up with cocoa powder or chocolate. I did remember from making the cake before that it was still kind of bland, even with a little thick yogurt on the side, so a fruit sauce would do it well. Then I remembered that frostings should be rich and sticky (I rarely forget this) and fruit just wouldn’t cut it. So I made a butterscotch frosting from the Joy of Cooking and made a quick blueberry syrup to garnish. Fruit + butterscotch + chestnuts = Heaven. Only problem is that the cake only keeps for 2 days max, but you can put it in the freezer and I kind of find that the freezing makes it deliciously denser and the butterscotch flavours jump out even more. No need to defrost or heat anything.
Sweet Chestnut Torte
1 cup chestnut purée (sweetened purée is what the recipe calls for, but if all you can find is unsweetened, or you prefer, you can just add sugar or a sugar substitute as long as you keep a similar consistency)
2 egg yolks
brandy
vanilla
1/4 cup flour
4 egg whites
cream of tartar
sugar
That’s honestly all the ingredients. So simple. This works best with a springform 8-inch pan but any kind of deep cake pan works fine. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. It will make your cake life easier. For your other life, you’re on your own.
1. Combine the chestnut purée, egg yolks, brandy and vanilla and then mix in the flour. Yeah, Medrich didn’t get around to saying how hard this one little step is…the purée is ridiculously thick that you can’t whisk it, but it gets clumpy if you just use a spoon. It’s also too thick for a blender, so a food processor or your hands are really your best options. A handheld mixer might almost do, but it might be frustrating.
2. Now the egg whites. Beat them on medium-high speed with the cream of tartar to the ambiguous level of “soft peaks”. Then slowly add the sugar and beat at high speed until the egg whites are “stiff but not dry”. Hmm…after so many mousses I still feel like a fool. I still am never sure if I do this step correctly…it’s not like if you ate the egg whites they would taste like dry goods, but they’re certainly not like a fluid anymore. Oh I don’t know.
3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
4. Fold a scoop of the egg whites into the chestnuts. Again, HARD! The chestnuts are pretty dense and the whites are not. How are you possibly supposed to keep any air in the whites when they’re being suffocated under layers of chestnut cement? I think next time I will sweeten my purée with honey instead of sugar to make it creamier and easier to mix. Maybe the can I bought is more dense than other cans? American cans? No, they’re all imported, so who knows why it didn’t work as well? I’ve made my own before but it’s a lot of work.
5. Fold in the remaining whites. A little easier now that the first 1/4 is in. Scrape the batter into the pan and use a spatula to smooth down the top. This cake does not rise anymore, so how you put it into the oven is how you hope to take it out.
6. Bake 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with just a few moist crumbs, says Medrich. How many is a few? This was a hard call. Know your oven is all the advice I can offer. Just know you’re probably just as uncertain as I was. When the cake is cool, remove it from the pan and peel the parchment paper off the bottom. Then flip it back into the pan to add the icing. If your torte collapses like mine tend to do, there’s no need to be careful when you’re flipping it over. There is nothing delicate about the egg whites anymore. Like a flower that bloomed and now is on the down-swing. Circle of cake-life and all. It makes me feel better about the results if I think of them as inevitable. Such is life.
This serves 10 people, apparently, with a grand total of 1.5 grams of fat per serving. What kind of cake does that? That’s why it needed the icing below:
Butterscotch Frosting (milk-free, optional vegan recipe)
4 tbsp butter, margarine or vegan margarine
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/8 tsp salt
2/3 cup almond milk (or soy milk, or regular milk, or 1/3 cup evaporated milk)
2-2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2-1 tsp vanilla or rum
First, you need to evaporate your milk. Almond milk does not come in convenient cans like evaporated cow’s milk, but it’s simple to make. Just heat your 2/3 cup of any type of milk in a saucepan over medium heat until it reduces by half. Almond and soy milk won’t curdle like regular milk if you put it at a higher temperature, so really you could bump up the heat to make this go faster if you watch it carefully and stir to make sure it doesn’t burn. You want to end up with 1/3 cup.
Then combine the milk with the butter (or margarine), salt and brown sugar in the top of a double boiler. I use a stainless steel bowl set over a pot of boiling water. Just make sure the bottom of your bowl doesn’t touch the surface of the water, and only have the water at a simmer, not a rapid boil. You just want to get everything melted and stirred together until it’s smooth. This step is beautiful.
Remove the bowl from the heat and let it cool for 5 minutes before beating in 2 cups of powdered sugar and the vanilla. My icing seemed too thin, so I added more powdered sugar until it seemed right. You should actually first set your bowl in a pan of ice water and beat without adding more sugar for awhile, just to see if it isn’t thickening because it’s still too hot. That way you can maybe save yourself multiple heart attacks from all the sugar in the icing. One is enough, thanks.
I wasn’t sure if this was going to be one of those icings that gets grainy and hardens on top. Those are gross. I poured it on the cooled cake right away. It’s actually a nice icing, not hardening and all, and even after sitting for a day before it was served, it held up decently. It kind of slid off the cake because it was still a bit runny, but more powdered sugar would have been a bad idea, so I left it at that.
Quick blueberry Syrup
My parents have about 5 open jars of jam and jellies and fruit-based sauces in the fridge that will never be used. So I took the remains of a wild blueberry spread, heated it in the microwave for 20 seconds and drizzled it over the iced cake. It wasn’t exactly artful but it looked interesting, and you can’t really undo a drizzle anyway. The mildly tart wild blueberry flavour was really good at cutting through the sweetness of the frosting. Mmm…delicious cake.
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