Dark Chocolate Covered Gluten Free Chestnut Bâtons
Print RecipeIngredients
- 3/4 lb fresh Italian Chestnuts
- 2 tbsp Maple Syrup
- 1 tsp Grass Fed Vanilla Ghee
- 2 tbsp water
- 3 tbsp hazelnut creamer
- dash of salt
- 1 tbsp cinnamon
- 2 organic veggie fed eggs
- 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 1 tbsp single malt bourbon
- 2 1/4 cup Gluten Free pastry Flour
- 1 cup confectioners sugar
- 100 g Organic Dark Chocolate
Instructions
Bring a small pot to boil and add the chestnuts cooking them for 20 min. Drain and let them cool so you can handle them. Take each chestnut and cut in quarters to get the white meat only out (careful for the brown protective layer between the meat and the shell) and discard the shells.
Roughly chop chestnuts and add to food processor or Vitamix blender with 1 tbsp of water, hazelnut creamer, dash of salt, maple syrup, Ghee, and Cinnamon. Blend for 2 minutes, pulsing in between.
Preheat oven to 350 F and prepare 2 parchment paper lined baking sheets or trays.
In a separate bowl add the baking soda with the bourbon. Add the chestnut mix to the bourbon and baking soda and 2 eggs, stir to incorporate.
Slowly add 1/4 of the flour at a time, kneading with your hands to form a dough. At first it will be quite sticky but as the flour gets incorporated it will start to form a crumbly like dough.
Take the dough and carefully roll into logs with both hands and place on 2 baking sheets. Bake for 20 minutes and let cool for an hour.
Once cooled off transfer to a cooling rack that sits a top with parchment paper. In a small pot on low heat melt the chocolate with 1 tbsp of water careful not to burn (about 2 min).
Take the chocolate off the heat and with a pastry brush sprinkle the melted chocolate on the chestnut batons, sprinkle with additional cinnamon and place in fridge for 10 min before allowing to cool at room temperature for an additional 20 minutes or until chocolate has hardened.
Some people impulse buy a pocket square, a pack of gum, or maybe the latest nut milk to come out of the Nestle factory, whatever floats your boat. I impulse buy high heels, they look great on my shoe shelf, screwdrivers, the ones you use for nails people not the ones that come with vodka (though sometimes I impulse buy that too which would explain why I have 2 bottles in my liquor cabinet), and apparently now its progressed to chestnuts. While at the grocery store I just couldn’t help myself, its like they looked back at me with their perfectly wrinkle free skins and I had nostalgic memories of delicious soup that I made 2 days ago ( yes it was that good that I started dreaming about it), and memories of them roasting over hot flames while walking in Europe, and so, they made the cut and into my basket they went.
The problem with impulse buys is that your never quite sure what to do with them. At 5am, the chestnuts made a deep dive into a pot of boiling water to be cracked open and turned into a soup. The great thing about impulse buys is that they can inspire creativity and not function quite the way you imagined. When the beige creamy nutmeats were cleaned and had overflowed the bowl they were dropped in, the “ah-ha” moment came and I knew it had to be something other than a soup and so the puree began. To the blender they went ready to finally rest, unfortunately the fourth cup of coffee must have kicked in and it was then decided that a puree was not enough, it had to be baked and transformed again into something unexpected. After multiple eggs came out and flour was thrown all over the place, enough so that my hair could have easily been mistaken for an on trend white color, the chestnut bâtons (a fancy French word for a heavy bat in which these cookies resemble because the dough is so delicate they would crumble if formed into anything else) was born.
Emerging from the oven, flaky, moist and with an uncanny ability to melt in your mouth, it then had to go a step further, after all who doesn’t love dark chocolate, especially when drizzled to form a hard exterior that plays nicely with the chestnut dough. Then again, sometimes impulses are better left as dreams and can only be a one time thing but I will be enjoying these for the next few days!
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