I first saw this slice at the red door cafe in Leura. It was served with sour cream and sugar syrup. I liked it so much (although I don’t think it needed the sugar syrup), that I wanted to try and make it as soon as I got home.
Chestnut & Rosemary Cake from Red Door Cafe, Leura:
Luckily, I had stocked up on some chestnut flour from Dijon Foods in castle hill. I think that the last cake I tried to make involving chestnuts was a chestnut chiffon cake… Using tinned chestnut puree.
I mixed the recipes from Australian Gourmet Traveller and Italyum. I later worked out that my copy of Silver Spoon also had this recipe, closer to the Italyum version.
I used 150g each of chestnut flour and plain flour, 3/4 cup of sugar, 50g almonds, and dried cranberries instead of sultanas.
My biggest hint: sift the damn flour. I normally don’t bother with this step, but I then spent a good thirty minutes hunting for the lumps in the batter. It was not worth the ten or so minutes that I saved at the beginning.
Batter up:
Eventually it turned very smooth, almost like a lotus seed paste, or indeed like chestnut puree. There was a slightly odd smell that I couldn’t place as I was mixing it.
I toasted my whole almonds, and then roughly crushed them with the mortar and pestle. This was to replicate the cake that I had eaten that morning.
Result:
This was just after 1 hour of baking including 10 minutes towards the end at 200 degrees to brown the top.
The cake was quite light and fluffy, unlike the one from the red door which I think had some almond meal in it and a lot more oil or butter. There was a slight bitter taste from the chestnut flour, but also sweetness and softness in the texture. If I go ahead with making a chiffon cake, the flour would work quite well.
I’ve still got 350g chestnut flour to practice with…
A Sydney Foodie 