Castagnaccio di Carnevale

Barbara from Barbara's Spielwiese  has called for recipes for the imminent season of carnival/carnevale/Fasching/Mardi Gras/Shrovetide....

Childhood memories came up and a salad made from raw herring rekindled my traumatised food experiences. Not that my mother was a bad cook - raw fish just disgusted me even at a tender age. The other option would have been Faschingskrapfen (jam donuts) which were the better part of my mum's carnival recipes but I'm not very fond of either very fat or very sweet things. So I had to go international and look for not so sweet alternatives. I know that the Italian cuisine has a great variety of baked carnival things but most of them are deep-fried. But then I found what I secretly was looking for, a castagnaccio!

A castagnaccio is a chestnut flour cake and originally an autumnal dish, eaten when young wine starts to be available. But in Tuscany it obviously also became typical for carnevale. Maybe because of the stories that say that if a girl gives her beloved one a piece of her castagnaccio he will love her forever. Well, the way to a man's heart is verily through his stomach. So it would also be made for Valentine's day which coincides nicely with carnival.

These are the ingredients I used for my castagnaccio:

The dough is more like a pancake dough; that's how it looks when poured into the baking dish (which ideally should have been a copper dish. Well, I used my not so posh quiche pan.

And the result fresh from the oven:

A look inside:

And here is the recipe:

Castagnaccio di Carnevale

adapted from La Tana di Mopo and the recipe collection Giallo Zafferano

Ingredients:

250 g chestnut flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup of plant-based milk (I used oat milk)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon sugar

zest from one orange (use an untreated one, you don't want pesticides and wax in your cake!)

a handful of raisins (soaked in juice from half an orange)

a handful of walnuts, chopped (leave some halves for decoration)

a handful of pine nuts

fresh rosemary

water as needed

What to do:

Sieve the flour because chestnut flour tends to lump together, add baking powder. Pour in the milk and mix. Add the rest of the ingredients apart from the walnut halves, pine nuts, and rosemary. Add water until you get a dough which is similar in consistency to pancake dough.

Grease your baking dish and dust with flour. Pour in your cake mixture. Sprinkle the walnuts, pine nuts and rosemary on top.

Bake  at 180° C for about 40 minutes. Let completely cool. Enjoy :)

Buon carnevale!