Ingredients
200g unsalted butter, plus melted butter for greasing
300g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
280g plain flour – gluten-free flour would work too
½ tsp salt
2 free-range eggs
220 g sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
250g fresh chestnuts or 200g cooked, peeled chestnuts – if chestnuts are out of season add roasted macadamias or almonds or white choc chips!
Summary
Chestnuts can be a bit baffling, but you learn a basic way of cooking them in this recipe that’s useful beyond brownie baking. Once their hard skins are removed, you can add them to all sorts of meals – we love blitzing them into pumpkin soup. Here, they add a mild, sweet reprieve from the onslaught of fudgy goodness. Fire up the coffee pot!
Chestnut Brownies:
Start by cooking the chestnuts. Score each chestnut along one side and place in a pot of boiling water. Boil for about 20 minutes then drain, and when cool enough to touch, peel both hard outer skin and thinner inner skin so that you’re left with the pale nut. Chop chestnuts roughly, or blitz if you prefer less prominent texture. Set aside.
When you are ready to make the brownies, brush a 22 cm square baking tin with melted butter and line with baking paper. Preheat the oven to 170°C.
Put the butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl and place over a saucepan of genlty simmering water, making sure the water does not touch the base of the bowl. Leave to melt, stirring occasionally from time to time. As soon as the butter and chocolate have melted, remove the bowl from the pan. This is important! You need to avoid getting the mix very hot.
In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and vanilla. Fold in the melted chocolate mixture. Sift the flour and salt into the bowl and fold to combine. Finally, add the chopped chestnuts and mix.
Spoon the mix onto the lined tin.
Place on the centre shelf of the oven and bake for roughly 25 minutes. When you stick a skewer inside your brownie, it must come out with gooey (but cooked) crumbs. Once out, allow to cool completely before removing from the tin. Cut into any shape you want and keep in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
I have a bunch of now rock-hard chestnuts that I gathered a year ago beneath the trees of various neighbors. I assume these are hybrids since our American chestnut trees were made extinct a century ago by blight. The gathered nuts have been in my fridge all this time. I forgot about them. As an experiment I have now softened them in my instant pot and am ready to use them. I have transcribed this brownie recipe’s metric measurements into US standard and am now ready to give it a go. It does not call for baking powder so I’m just hoping that the flour that is listed with the ingredients is not meant to be self-rising. Even if I had self-rising flour on hand, our self-rising flour here in the States is not of the same composition as is that which is available in, say, Britain.
Ooh how exciting, let us know how they turn out Esther! PS where are you writing from, sounds like you’ve found us from further away than usual 😉