Castagnaccio - Tuscan chestnut "cake"

Chestnut flour is still an unusual ingredient in our kitchens, unfortunately.
To mill chestnut into flour, they are first dried over wood fire and this imparts the resulting product with a delicate and distinctive smoky aroma that make this flour pretty unique.
Being a nut´s flour, it doesn't contain gluten and so it is an useful ingredient for gluten-free pantries.
In Italy, chestnut flour is a traditional ingredient of the center-north portion of the peninsula. In Tuscany, notably, chestnut flour is used in a savory-sweet cake called Castagnaccio (castagna being the Italian for chestnut).
This cake is usually enriched with flavorful extra-virgin olive oil, pine nuts and rosemary but the main variation point in local recipes revolve around the use of cocoa powder in it.
Chestnut flour, with its deep rich sweet and smoky aromas, is just a perfect companion to chocolate and the use of a little cocoa powder in the Castagnaccio can only do it good, in my opinion.
I personally, simply adore rosemary in my Castagnaccio. When baked to crispy perfection, this herb lends its heady green-field aromas to this earthy densely satisfying cake; a perfect reminder of Tuscan sunbathed fields.
Try it once, and you will be hooked. You have been warned!

Comforting Italian Trifle

Comfort.

What is comfort to our eyes? The feeling of home? A completely relaxed body? Or conversely a hyperactive session of our favorite sport? A visit to a museum can be comforting to many, but just because we stand still for hours in front of a magnificent piece of art it doesn't mean that our mind isn't going 100 miles an hour.

Generally we tend to associate the word comfort with something soft, fluffy, enveloping and translating this abstract and deep feeling into food is quite an interesting endeavor.
Certain ingredients can, by themselves, elicit such an emotional response so much so that we may find ourselves savoring luscious sour cream by the spoonful directly from the tub in these deep moments of need. The texture of fatty rich food makes us melt into expressions of pure enjoyment, probably an instinctual response to the fact that we are well provided for the cold season.

Coco-nutty crepes cake for #NellysBigDay

So it seems that the day has come... Nelly got hooked up. Nah it isn't for her endless ranting about the sprigs of mint over desserts and neither because of her magnificent contribution to the extintion of bananas
Murray finally asked her to be his lovely wife (blinkey-blinkey ring and all). But I bet you all know that by now, she was squeeking for DAYS! I had to use hamburger buns on my ears to avoid breaking my timpans.

Joke aside, Nelly is just on of the sweetest-jumping Dominican I have met so far. We know each other since 1 year but as all Twitter-relationships, we end up knowing each other more than we do our family. We do spend the best part of hour waking hours together after all.

Sweet, Sweet Awards

Sugar; we all know this fella, don't we?
A mysterious substance able to give us pleasure; not guilt free unfortunately.
Coming in all the shades of brown, tawny to sparkling white we are used to sprinkle it on many of our food items to enhance their flavors. Present in many natural products it represents the way nature is able to store easily accessible energies; it won't come to any surprise then that it is made of just about the most abundant chemical elements present on Earth: Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Since few years we have been coming accustomed to choose among different varieties of sugars. Being them of natural origins or artificial, the main reason driving research in this field is the delivery of guilt-free low caloric substitutes for saccharose.

If from one side we restrict our kids' sugar intake, we as society have been over-exposed to sweetness for the last century or so; the result is a sort of dependency on this chemical.
"A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!" sang Mary Poppins to the whining kids and that's what we tell to ourselves often and again.

The Secret Recipe Club and a cloudlike fluffy cake

This is the first of hopefully a long list of posts.
Few weeks ago through the Yahoo-group foodbloggers Amanda of Amanda's Cookin made us think about how many people actually tried our recipes leaving perhaps a comment with a feedback on our posts.
Many of us felt the same in affirming that we love when this happens, we do this for you guys after all; we do enjoy our food but the ultimate word is spoken from our guests and readers. I guess this is a special application of the old saying "If a tree falls in a deserted forest would it still make a noise?".

With our posts we often don't do anything else than throwing a pebble out there in the big lake of news, ranting, opinions and recipes. Sometimes we ourselves are attraced by one of these same pebbles shining through the "increspata" surface of this lake so to pick it up and add our special touch to it before sending it back. There are way too many pebbles on this lake's bed and some gets out of sight pretty easily so it is nice when we have that special pair of goggles that allows us to isolate a group of them from the rest.
Amanda helped us in doing just this by setting a new monthly bloging event: "The Secret Recipe Club".

Light and sweet as a feather

Few weeks ago wondering around the web, I guess through StumbleUpon, I stumbled on Priya’s blog “Now Serving...". The landing page couldn’t have been more fit for the days I was going through.
Since few weeks I am trying to spend some of my working time designing cakes so to build up a portfolio for the Cake Designing part of my future consulting business. I have to say that these have been lovely hours spent with some good designing book and with the pencil back in my hand. It has been ages since I last draw something for fun. Going into the digital world has meant that all the space on the table was taken by the laptop.
I was missing those creative times when you just need an eraser to clear up a mistake; a ruler and a compass are sufficient to frame and regulate your thoughts.

Orange cake: one and a hundred

From the records of this blog, you might have realized that I do not really bake that much; I usually do so more for catering than for private appreciation.
It is more than one year already that a friend of mine asked me to bake for her a weekly orange cake. I worked over the recipe she gave me to bring it to my liking (though still I could tweak it) but after the beginning excitement it all looked quite repetitive.
As usual, I do not really like to repeat my things over and over again if not for the purpose of development so I ended up producing quite a certain variety of orange cakes. The cake is a really nice one, neither too sweet nor too rich but very aromatic and satisfying and different garnishing add specific accents to the orange flavor; Chinese rice wine, rose’s petals, rose water and orange blossom water, tarragon, pink pepper, gooseberries or rhubarb played all a role in one version or another.
This post serves the purpose to show how versatile a single cake recipe can be, without the need of including a frosting or pastry cream of any sorts.

Basic and delicious Orange Cake

A plastic delight

Childhood brings always good memories back. What if we could play like then and also satisfy our grown up needs? Right, we need chocolate in this; plastic chocolate.
This will be lots of fun for your kids to play with and very useful to you to decorate your cakes making luscious bows, little animal or roses like these ones.

It is easy to make and to work with, here there is how to do it.
Plastic Chocolate
Ingredients:

• 100g dark chocolate;
• 30g light corn syrup (any kind of syrup will work I used Agave syrup for instance).

Method:
Cut the chocolate with a saw knife and melt it in a double boiler. Take it away when it is almost totally melted and continue stirring until it will be shiny and fully melted. Add the corn syrup and mix until the mixture gets together (it may become a bit grainy, but that is normal).Cut a big piece of cling film, poor the mixture over half of it; cover it with the other half of the cling film and flatten properly. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight before using it.
When ready, work the mass in batches with the palm of your hands until soft and warmed up ready to model.

And it was that the four Velveteers were born

Who are we? A new secret gastronomical order equivalent to the Illuminati? Can’t really answer that, unless you pass your initiation ordeal. What's our purpose apart from messing up our kitchens? Work together around a theme, a recipe; explore its different sides shone by our different cultures and life stories. Who are we? Aren’t you curious! Oh well, since secrecy doesn’t really exist in the virtual world (let alone the real one) here we go: Aparna, Asha, Pamela and me.
The first challenge was to create a Red Velvet Cake preferably using only natural colorings; that is why Pam came up with the Velveteers nickname.
Recipes for this cake often call for the use of two entire bottles of artificial coloring (that might indeed produce such a red cake that will be worth serving to Santa Claus). There aren`t really many vegetarian ingredients characterized by a bright red, enough intense and stable to heat to act as coloring in baking.
The first to come to mind are indeed red beets. Who hasn't had his/her fingers or tablecloth stained by these roots? Other red things are actually fruits; namely strawberries, raspberries, peppers, tomatoes, pomegranate etc. My job was that of trying the raspberries. Easy job you might think, until you realize how sour they are. Yes we use sugar to cover it up; exactly COVER it up. Sugar doesn't make raspberry puree any less acid (in other words more alkaline); our gustatory papillae simply don't perceive the sourness that much under the great sweetness. My task was then to balance this acidity with the alkaline ingredients already present in the recipe.
Here we go hands at my old chemistry book to look for pH definition and example of use; Google from its side provided me with the relative pH for each of the aforementioned ingredient. So hands at pencil and papers or rather keyboard and Notepad document to try and solving the riddle.

Ingredient	pH
Baking Soda	8.2
Buttermilk	4.41-4.83 (4.62)
Dutch Cocoa	7.0
Milk	6.6
Normal Cocoa	5.8
Raspberry Purée	3.3
Vinegar	2.4
Few ingredients found commonly in baking along with their pH values.