The equivalent here is courgette and while I occasionally hear eggplant instead of aubergine, I never hear the word zucchini. I personally prefer zucchini to courgette because it’s just more fun. Ironically I was looking for courgettes (thinking zucchini) when I heard this woman say zucchini.

In my current bid to recapture my childhood, a recurring theme in my posts on Freyas blog, I had decided to make zucchini bread. I had everything in the cupboard to do a great recipe from the classic book Beard on Bread (James Beard 1973) except for zucchini. Now my mom will wonder why I haven’t used her recipe from the family cookbook, but I’m claiming immunity under the double jeopardy clause as this recipe has already been used once this year. Besides, it’s only because of my mom that I like zucchini bread or rather despite my moms attempts to put me off zucchini forever.

When I was a kid, my mom and her friend Gin had garden plots at LaCrosse Floral. They would go to the garden just about every day in the summer and pull weeds while my brother Mark and I would play under a big willow tree on the property. Occasionally they would rope us into carrying buckets of water around, but for the most part we were free to play under that tree with no obligation. We didn’t realise in the early weeks that we were simply buying on credit. We weren’t informed of the terms of the contract either. It was only when presented with massive sacks full of green beans to top and tail that we realised that we were not only paying the debt back, but at a massive APR, the monetary equivalent of which would be around 78.9%.

Hour after hour we’d sit in the basement while our friends rode bikes, flew kites, and played baseball. Fingers green, knuckles aching, skin dry from the little fuzz on fresh beans that soaks up moisture like a sponge, we would stagger outside to play in the last remaining hour of daylight. The whole process would begin the next day and the day after that. I’ll tell you something too, there’s no way to efficiently cut the ends off of beans. You line them up thinking it’s faster to hack at twenty beans at a time, but this just isn’t the case. One at a time is the easiest method, albeit monotonous.

Yes, beans were abundant. Fortunately I loved them and still do. The only other thing that grew in that garden was something I wasn’t as fond of, zucchini. I hated it! When I was a kid, before the days of lazy parenting, or at least during the awkward phasing in period of lazy parenting, not liking food didn’t mean not eating food. Since beans freeze and zucchini doesn’t I was condemned to zucchini every single summer day.

My mom did make attempts at preserving these horrible marrows. I don’t remember them all, but I’m sure she canned some and I know for a fact that she even managed to make zucchini powder. I remember it being in a little bottle and having it sprinkled over food in place of other seasonings, you know, the kind that actually tasted of something. While her attempts to maintain this particular method of torture throughout the winter months proved unsuccessful for the most part, at least her ability to disguise the device of torture was more refined. The most effective of her ruses was, you guessed it, zucchini bread!

I remember the taste and texture and how great this bread was cold with a layer of butter. I also remember that there was a lot of this when I was growing up. A funny thing happens when you use vegetables as the foundation of a bread dough or cake batter (and make no mistake, the word bread is only used to make this seem healthier. Zucchini Bread is actually a cake.). A natural sweetness and moisture is imparted into the finished product that can’t be achieved by any other means. The reason is that vegetables have a very high water content, but for the most part retain their shape during cooking. When added to a bread or cake the cell walls of the vegetable don’t break down until the baking process nears completion. This means that the moisture in the vegetable is delivered gradually through the process of osmosis over several days. The addition of a vegetable to bread or cake means the finished product will stay edible for several days longer. Want proof? Carrot cake!

Zucchini bread is very similar to and, in my opinion, better than carrot cake. It’s only the colour and absence of alliteration that prevents it from capturing the adoration by the masses currently heaped on the altar of carrot cake. Freya disagrees with me on this point, but she would, being slavishly devoted to the cream cheese frosting and the “cute little frosting carrot on top” that garishly garnishes the iconic carrot cake. But it just ain’t fair! Zucchini bread is carrot cakes ugly little brother. He doesn’t get the chicks and he wouldn’t be caught dead in the same outlandish wardrobe, but by gum, he will prove himself and he’ll do it on his own merits!

CARL GOHS’ ZUCCHINI BREAD (From James Beard Beard on Bread)
Ingredients:
3 Eggs
2 Cups granulated sugar (a lot, even by 1970’s standards)
1 Cup vegetable oil (I used sunflower)
2 Cups grated, peeled raw zucchini
3 Teaspoons vanilla extract
3 Cups plain flour
1 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon baking soda
1/3 Teaspoon baking powder
3 Teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 Cup coarsely chopped walnuts (I omitted this)

METHOD
Beat the eggs until light and foamy. Add the sugar, oil, zucchini, and vanilla and mix lightly but well. Combine the flour, salt, soda, baking powder, and cinnamon and add to the egg-zucchini mixture. Stir until well blended, add nuts, and pour into 2 greased loaf tins. Bake in a preheated oven (350°F/175°C) for one hour. Cool on a rack before serving.

By Paul Erickson (husband of Freya and baking hero)

The original recipe, entitled Love Apple Tart, had a slightly more Mediterranean feel than my own taste buds dictated, using anchovies and olives but I wanted something more bolstering. I wanted onions and I wanted Goats cheese!

Let me elaborate. Not all of us have a sweet tooth (although I am guilty as charged) or, we won’t have time to produce a romantic three course meal for the big V-Day due to familial obligations, work etc. Strawberries are not particularly great at this time of the year – what’s the point of being fed fruit that makes you wince with sourness?

This Love Apple Tart, adapted from a recipe in this months Country Kitchen, hits the spot. It serves as a main course for dinner, plus it is suitably romantic enough to show the loved one in your life that you have made an effort. Furthermore, you can recycle the recipe, using a round tin instead, at anytime of the year.

What this picture doesn’t show is our ‘arts and crafts’ (read botched) heart shaped mould, professionally fashioned by my husband from a cornflake box and some tinfoil. What this picture also fails to indicate is the collapsing of the tart whence it was moved from the pizza stone and onto a plate. Still, this teaches us two things: 1) use proper bakeware and 2) use round tart tins. Frankly though, it tasted delicious and if it’s just for the two of you, then who cares if you’re eating the tomatoes with your fingers and breaking bits of pastry off because you can’t wait for it to cool off?

CHERRY TOMATO, GOATS CHEESE AND ONION MARMALADE TART
serves 2

Ingredients:
Shortcrust Pastry
500g Cherry Tomatoes, small vine ones have the most flavour
100g Goats Cheese, any kind, soft and crumbly or sliceable
2 Large onions, peeled and sliced
Salt and Pepper
Teaspoon Brown Sugar
Drizzle Olive Oil
20g Butter

METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 180c.  Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the onions, some salt, lots of pepper and the sugar. Let them sweat down over a low heat for half an hour or until collapsed, golden and a bit like marmalade. Leave to cool.

Whatever shape tin you choose to punish yourself with, you will need to line it with your shortcrust pastry which is then to be blind baked for about 15 minutes.  Remove the pastry crust from the oven and spread the onion mixture over the base. Crumble the Goats Cheese over the top of this then top with the cherry tomatoes. Grind over some more black pepper, a pinch of salt and a little olive oil (not too much because the Goats Cheese gives off a lot of oil).

Bake for 30 minutes or until the tomatoes start to pop but not collapse.  Leave to cool for about 5 minutes before attempting to unmould but I’ll tell you here and now, you’ll have issues so it’s best just to serve it in the tin.

Regardless of how you spend Valentines Day, whether you’re slurping oysters and champagne in Paris, or sharing a Big Mac in Braintree, have a wonderful day!

Baking is a science.  If you’ve ever spent time in a chemistry lab you’ll know that you must be sure of quantities and reaction times or risk blowing up the entire Science Department.  While there’s little fear of blowing up your kitchen with biscuit dough, it is important to understand the chemical process of baking to yield good results.

Making a decent loaf of bread is the result of a variety of factors.  People tend to think of bread in terms of components.  Yeast, flour, and water are indeed useful, but the single most important ingredient in bread is carbon dioxide.  The device whereby every loaf of bread, every roll, and every muffin you make rises is the distribution of CO2 throughout the dough.

There are certain rules of thumb I tend to follow when I bake bread:

Rule #1:  Activate your yeast.  I tend to bake with potato water (reserve water from boiling potatoes) for a softer loaf of bread with a bit more longevity.  If you use this water (warm, but not hot) (yeast dies at 140°F ), mixed with a teaspoon of sugar, to activate your yeast, you’ll have a really good foundation to build on.  I allow my mixture to stand for at least ten minutes until it gets very frothy.

Rule #2:  Sift your flour.  Sifted flour has more air in it.  Don’t make your yeast work harder than it has to.

Rule #3:  Knead your dough until it’s done, not until you’re bored.

Rule #4:  Allow your dough to rise for as long as possible.  This, of course, is not always easy, but do it anyway.  Most bread dough requires an initial rising and a secondary rising.  The first rising in a bowl in a warm place.  The second in the pan it will be baked in.  In most cases, you can let the dough rise in the fridge overnight, but make sure it’s up to room temperature again before you punch it down.

Rule #5:  Score your bread with a razor.  Imagine your dough as a plastic sack tightly packed with sponges.  When you slice through the bag the sponges are free to pop out.  The outside of a ball of dough develops a surface tension from kneading which traps air inside.  If you make a clean cut through that skin your bread will rise much higher as carbon dioxide escapes through the cuts.  A knife is not sharp enough for this procedure though, so I keep a razor blade on hand for this procedure.

Rule #6:  Turn your oven up as high as it will go for the initial cooking, even if this is only for five minutes.  Bread dough rises more in the first few minutes of baking than at any other time.  Bakers refer to this as “Oven Spring” as the bread can increase in size by 1/3 in just 2-3 minutes.

Rule #7:  Humidify your oven.  Keeping a bottle with an atomizer around is very important.  This isn’t to lower the temperature of the oven; it serves to keep the outside of your dough moist.  This prevents a crust from forming too rapidly.  Subsequently, your bread has longer to rise.  I generally spray my oven thoroughly before my dough goes in and then every ten minutes or so until the bread is finished.

Rule #8:  (Taken from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)  Don’t Panic!

This week I have made rice bread.  The recipe is slightly unusual in that it makes use of cooked rice and rice water, but it is also very simple to make.  I have made two variants.

The first was last Saturday at my mother-in-law’s house.  For that version I slightly undercooked the rice (easy cook long grain) leaving a bit of bite in the middle.  I left the grains of rice whole and mixed them into my flour.  The rice was distributed throughout the bread and some was on the outside of the loaf.  It was similar in texture to a seeded loaf, but without exacerbating my Freya’s intolerance to seeds and grains.  My mother-in-law ate an entire loaf and didn’t complain despite her problems with white bread.  Freya and I polished our loaf off in about two hours some of it going to make massive grilled cheese sandwiches!

The second loaf, made tonight, was prepared a bit differently.  I cooked the rice (Basmati) until it went mushy.  I drained the water into a bowl and then forced all the rice through the sieve with a pestle.  This loaf maintained its shape perfectly.  The texture was very light and balanced with a firm, chewy crust, but we’re saving the majority of the bread for Pig in a Trough tomorrow night.

Rice Bread

INGREDIENTS
6 cups plain white flour sifted
¼ cup rice, any white variety
2 cups water
7 grams dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt

METHOD
1. Boil rice in water for twenty minutes until tender or longer until mushy. Drain water through a sieve into a bowl. Reserve rice for later or push through the sieve with a pestle.

2. Allow water to cool briefly (Temperature should be about 100°F). Add yeast and sugar, mix thoroughly, and allow ten minutes to activate.

3. Mix flour, salt, and any remaining rice in a bowl. Add yeast and water and mix until all ingredients are amalgamated.

4. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for 15 minutes adding more flour if dough is too sticky or more water if dough is too dry (I boil a kettle and let the water cool a bit before I start making my dough. Then if I need some tepid water while I’m mixing I can take it from the kettle.).

5. Put dough in a clean bowl, cover with a damp cloth and allow to rise for 2 hours. Punch down the dough and knead for about a minute. Reshape the dough and put in bread pan or onto a pizza stone. Make a few slashes in the bread with a razor and allow to rise for 30 minutes.

6. Preheat oven to 450°F/230°C. When the oven is up to temperature, humidify. Put the bread in the oven. After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 400°F/200°C, misting with water again. Cook for an additional 15 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Agave Nectar comes from the sap produced in the heart of the Agave Plant.  The plant is crushed and put through a process which extracts the syrup in its raw form.  It is then filtered and heated to a level which breaks down the raw sugar into fructose.  At this stage, the syrup can be further refined to produce a pale amber colour or bottled as is, in the dark, rich chestnut colour.  There are also different genuses of the Agave plant, very much like honey, which infuse the syrup with floral or vanilla top notes.  Like Maple Syrup, Agave Nectar comes in various patinas and flavours, all of which have different properties in cooking but with a less aggressive taste than synthetic sugars, which is great for people, like myself, who can taste saccharin a mile off.  No chemicals whatsoever are used in the production of pure Agave Nectar.

When you try Agave Syrup neat, if like me, with your finger stuck in the bottle because you’re not ladylike enough to use a spoon, you will see that the flavour is a rare hybrid of honey and maple syrup but much finer than either.  It is 25% sweeter than granulated sugar but it doesn’t have an eye-wincing, tooth-cringing sweetness when you sample it.  Despite being clinically sweeter than sucrose, it has no more calories, which basically means you can use less of it in cooking to a similar or identical effect.  The texture of Agave Nectar is thinner even than maple syrup which also makes measuring somewhat less of a sticky process than getting all gummed up with honey or golden syrup. 

The most important factor about using Agave Nectar, are its processing properties:  when consumed it is absorbed into the blood stream slowly so it doesn’t cause that all familiar ‘sugar high’ that you get after binging on chocolate or biscuits (rapidly followed by a sugar low that can cause headaches).  The Agave plant has a very low glycaemic index so blood sugar levels aren’t significantly elevated, which makes it ideal for diabetics.  There is much more information available on the web which details the rigourous scientific testing that the Agave Nectar has been put through but in short the final test of its affectiveness is to try it out.  I came across a website called Sweet Savvy whilst investigating this natural sweetener, that has many Agave Nectar recipes - some savoury, some sweet, some traditional – that diabetics will previously have had to have foregone for medical reasons.

I am particularly excited about trying out a Carrot Cake recipe but I’m out of cream cheese and I must have cream cheese icing on Carrot Cake.  So, with that in mind, I made some Shortbread Biscuits instead, replacing the usual caster sugar with Agave Syrup.  I prepared some plain biscuits (which I then dusted in Vanilla Caster Sugar - obviously diabetics would omit this stage), and some Linzer Cookies which I filled with my homemade Greengage, Damson and Crab Apple Jam.  If you plan to use Agave Syrup instead of regular sugar, expect it to be a little hit and miss, particularly in baking.  You will need to reduce the amount of other liquids (i.e. milk or egg) to compensate for extra liquid of the Agave, you may also need to use a smaller quantity of the syrup because it is 25% sweeter.  Finally, you may need to reduce the heat of your oven by 10-20 degrees because the fructose in the syrup seems to burn quicker.  So, my recommendation to anyone wanting to experiment is just to be extra vigilant watching the oven and not to be too upset if your buns come out flat or your cake collapses, you’ll simply know next time to adjust it.

Here is the recipe for the shortbread in the meantime.  I will post the Carrot Cake recipe in due course, once I’ve made it and taste tested it!
This is taken from the Sweet Savvy website where you can find lots more recipes.

SHORTBREAD BUTTER COOKIES
(this would make about 40 3” cookies or 20-25 Linzer Cookies, obviously the size of the cutter makes a difference!)
Ingredients:
170g Butter
¼ Cup Agave Syrup
¾ Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
1 2/3 Cup Plain Flour
Pinch Salt

METHOD:
Put butter in a large mixing bowl and leave to soften at room temperature.  Once soft, beat well with an electric mixer or use someone burly with a wooden spoon.  The beating of the butter enables the biscuits to stay crisp and light.

Beat in the Agave Syrup and Vanilla Extract until smooth and fully incorporated.  Sift in the flour and salt slowly, mixing until a very stiff batter is formed (it will almost be like pastry dough – yes, that thick!).

Cover with clingfilm and chill for at least two hours.  After two hours chilling, the shortbread dough will be very workable (in fact, the most workable dough I have ever used) but does warm up quickly, so if you have to cook in batches, I recommend you work in halves, putting one half of dough in the fridge whilst you work on the other half.

Preheat the oven to 150c.  On a well floured surface, roll out the dough to whatever thickness you desire.  If you go thinner, you will get lovely butter crisp biscuits that are delicate, if you go thicker, you will get something that resembles the shortbread that you buy in the stores.  Either are perfect!  Use cookie cutters to cut out different shapes (I used stars) and place on a silicone sheet or piece of grease proof paper on a baking sheet.  The original recipe recommended greasing the sheet heavily but I just used a quick spritz of Baker’s Joy (you could use some of that butter in a can for a light greasing).

Bake for between 7-10 minutes depending on thickness.  They will brown very quickly and once they turn, they taste burnt and not so good. The cookies will be soft but crisp up rapidly upon contact with the air outside of the cooker.

If you want to make Linzer cookies, use the shape of your choice on your cutter, bake as above but leave to cool completely.  Once cool you can sandwich them together with a scant teaspoon of your favourite jam.  These would make a beautiful present as they look like tiny stained glass windows - very Christmassy!

First noted by physicians as early as 1819, this is called the French Paradox:  people who lead a seemingly unhealthy lifestyle living well into their 80’s and 90’s.

A startling investigation carried out by the British Heart Foundation in 1992 shows that in spite of the French consuming over four times as much butter, 60% more cheese and 3 times as much pork as their American counterparts, the rate of heart disease among the French was only 83 per 100,000 compared to 230 per 100,000 in the US.

Red Wine contains Resveratrol, which can reduce Cardiovascular Disease and other heart ailments that cause stress on the body, although in such minute dilutions that the human body shouldn’t really benefit from it at all.  However, if the studies are correct – and the longevity of the French, and to a lesser extent, the Italians, who also enjoy a glass or two, seems to be ongoing proof of this – the consumption of red wine in particular provides a number of health benefits including anti-cancer, anti-aging and anti-viral.  Current reports suggest that it might be particularly beneficial with the fight against Alzheimer’s Disease and HIV.

It is no wonder then, that when these findings were released to the general public in the 1990’s that sales of wine increased notably.

However, whilst the French have pulled off this medical paradox for years, probably even centuries, it is not advisable to counter the obvious health risks of smoking or eating fat-laden foods by drinking extra gallons of wine.  A daily intake of more than two glasses of wine can increase the risk of Cirrhosis (a degenerative disease of the liver exacerbated by a large consumption of alcohol and the main cause of death in chronic alcoholics) and cancer of the mouth/respiratory system, therefore, of course, removing any health benefits that it initially offers.

This is all very well, but how can you gain from these obvious health benefits if you are unable to drink wine?  You may be teetotal because of religious abstinence or for other reasons; you or your children might be underage or maybe you just don’t like the taste.

A Canadian company called Vinifera for Life has produced a cunning product that promises to give you all of the benefits of Resveratrol found in grapes but without the alcohol intake:  flour, or (the company themselves seem a little unsure as to what it actually is yet) a powder that is used in small quantities in home baking or pasta.

The flour is made from what is left of the grape after it has been discarded following the wine making process, more astutely known as the pomace.  It is a proven fact that, as with most fruits and vegetables in nature, that the main nutrients are found in the skin and the grape is no different.  The pomace is put through a drying, sifting and grinding process to produce the flour which is added to normal flour to produce a deep purple coloured, more flavourful bread or, apparently, a lighter pasta.  It certainly seems to me that if you were to serve violet coloured pasta or bread to children, they would eat it with gusto, because children seem to enjoy lurid coloured foods, plus they would be benefiting from the high levels of the Resveratrol, thus theoretically ensuring them a good start in life.

Vinifera for Life have a number of recipes on their site using their flour:  Focaccia (where approximately a tenth of the regular flour is replaced with the wine flour), Pasta (where it replaces a quarter of the regular flour) and even a wine-scented frozen yogurt.  

According the CK Foods Website, currently one of the few distributors of this highly specialized flour, you can also incorporate it into cheese-making and bring in a variety of ‘noses’, Chardonnay, Cabernet and Icewine.  The selling point is that you could serve a Chardonnay Baguette with Cabernet Pasta for supper, and in addition to impressing your guests, be gaining all the benefits of wine without over-extending any potential health risks.

Wine Flour is only available in Canada at the moment but it does seem to hold great promise.  Vinifera for Life is planning on introducing this into the US and more pertinently into Europe where wine consumption is prevalent and, depending on certain factors (cost and taste are two that spring to mind), this could be the new wonder health product of the millennium.

And no hangover in the morning either!

Apparently though, these things serve a purpose.  The spider is to catch unsightly insects, the bricks are to fill the gap in the wall where the new window was fitted over a year ago and the chestnut flour is to cook with.  Of course, as this is an article on cookery, and unusual cookery at that, I won’t bore you with my noted lack of housekeeping skills, or my husband’s lack of DIY motivation.  Instead I will discuss that most Italian of ingredients, chestnuts and more importantly, chestnut flour.  Most of us have had roasted chestnuts at some point in our lives.  You may have bought them from a street vendor and burnt your fingers trying to peel them, maybe you’ve been lucky enough to have tasted the delicate, sweet/salty fudgyness of Marron Glaces.  Or, like me, you have gathered them up down a country lane and then roasted them on an open fire.  They have such a distinctively rich, indulgent flavour that you can see why chestnuts have strong connotations with Christmas.  Originally considered peasant food, they are very high in carbohydrates and incredibly filling when milled and turned into flour.  The chestnut is still very important to Italian Culinary culture and each year they celebrate the Chestnut Harvest with a festival.

Chestnut flour is unlike most other flours in that it doesn’t contain the gluten content found in normal grain-based flours.  So it is ideal for gluten intolerant guests (although when used in cookery, the chestnut flavour is predominant and I wouldn’t recommend using it for making, say, an Angel Food Cake or some other light confectionary due the mealiness of it).  I bought a bag of chestnut flour, which I had to import from France for a ridiculously large amount of money (but I did get a free oven glove so I suppose there’s an upside to it), a couple of years ago when we were heavily into our Italian phase of cookery.  I was making Risotto like there was going to be an Arborio famine and my husband experimented with homemade pasta and ravioli.  I used the chestnut flour to make some pasta.  After kneading the dough for a couple of minutes, it rapidly became clear to me that I would need to enlist someone burlier than me to finish the job.  Let me elaborate, kneading chestnut pasta dough is somewhat like kneading clay.  It is very, very thick indeed.  I suppose that the lack of gluten means that it needs that much longer to get it going.  After about forty five minutes of kneading and enough pummelling to put a Swedish Masseuse to shame, my husband, bowed but undefeated, had produced a glorious ball of pasta dough that contained his blood, sweat and tears.  We ran it through the pasta machine (turned by hand, not by motor), turned it into Chestnut Tagliatelli, boiled for a couple of minutes and then tossed it in a delicate Alfredo sauce that had been punctuated with tiny fresh vine tomatoes cut in half.  The taste was undeniably chestnut.  It had a mouth-filling taste of the earth that was unique.

When you taste chestnut used in this way, it is hard to imagine how some sugar can turn it from an earthy savoury dish into a much-desired sweetmeat.  So, after two years of the partially used bag of flour sitting in my cupboard, I decided to turn it into just that.  A sweetened delicacy – a chestnut flour cake, known famously in Italy as a Castagnaccio.  Castagnaccio has evolved over time from a cake originally carried by Roman Soldiers, many hundreds of years ago, when they were exploring and conquering unknown parts of the Roman Empire.  It has great cultural significance and is still made to this day, albeit in a slightly more palatable form.

This was probably the most unusual method for making a cake that I have ever come across.  It doesn’t contain eggs, or butter or a rising agent or vanilla extract.  Just three ingredients:  chestnut flour, olive oil and sugar, all mixed together with a litre of cold water.  The batter is then studded with nuggets of raisins, shards of fresh rosemary and pine nuts.  The raisins sink to the bottom, but the nuts and herbs striate the top of the cake.  You can imagine how beautiful this looks when you first remove it from the oven, all golden brown, the nuts and rosemary toasted.  The cake itself is a similar texture to a fresh chestnut, almost marzipan-like and tinted a pale, pale lilac.  It is a curiously lovely cake that can be served with some fresh ricotta or spread with butter.  Incredibly simple to make.

CASTAGNACCIO

Ingredients:
500g Chestnut Flour
75g Caster Sugar (I actually used 100g because I prefer to enhance the natural sweetness of the chestnuts)
3 tablespoons Olive Oil (I used regular cooking olive oil, fairly cheap) plus 2 for oiling the tin
1 Litre Cold Water
50g Pine Nuts
75g Sultanas soaked for 10 minutes in warm water (I used 100g because that finished the bag up)
2 Tablespoons freshly chopped (roughly) Rosemary
You can also add some orange zest to the batter but I didn’t have any oranges in the house.

METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 190c.

Grease a cake tin, round or square, no smaller than 8” dia/square.  The smaller the tin, the deeper and therefore more dense the cake will be.  I used an 8” springform tin.  Grease well with 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

Mix the chestnut flour and sugar in a bowl.  Stir in the 3 tablespoons of olive oil.  The flour/sugar mixture will drink this up.  Gradually pour in the litre of water, beating all the time with a wooden spoon until lump-free (you may need to use your whisk to get rid of any pesky lumps but there shouldn’t be many).

Pour into your oiled tin.  Sprinkle the (drained) sultanas, pine nuts and chopped rosemary onto the top of the cake.  The sultanas will mostly sink to the bottom as the cake cooks.  Bake anywhere from between 45 minutes to 1 ½ hours depending on the size of your tin (working on the basis that the large the tin, the shallower the cake, so the shorter the baking time).  A skewer will not come out clean even when the cake is fully baked so you have go by sight.  It will be a rich golden brown, the nuts and rosemary tinged bronze, and it will have started to come away from the edges, and will be springy to the touch.

Leave to cool.  Once cooled, the cake will have stabilized into a fudge-like texture and will be ready to serve, dusted with icing sugar and some fresh ricotta or spread with butter, if desired.