London foraged roasted Chesnuts

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One of my favorite spreads on toasted sourdough bread is Chestnut Spread.  I usually bring back a few pots with me back from France, but when I run out, and this usually happens before Christmas, I usually manage to restrain my cravings with a few roasted chestnuts that you can find everywhere around London’s Christmas markets.

Chestnuts from the Ardeche region in France are famous and roasting them at home in the fireplace with the special chestnut pan is a favorite childhood memory of mine! When I was young we used to sit around the fire on cushions and wait for my dad to take them off the hot coals. We would then crack their burned crunchy skins on stacked old newspapers and eat them straight away!

The smell in the house after roasting chestnuts is unforgettable and this is what I wanted RIGHT NOW! My husband mentioned a few weeks before about this chestnut tree on his way to work that had beautiful red and orange colours and that we should go take some pictures. That was it, I had my moment! I am always foraging (yes even in London), and planning a chestnut foraging trip made my day! It turned out this chestnut tree was a maroon tress (chestnut for pigs as we call it in France), but I knew I have seen chestnut trees before and we decided to head straight to Hyde park on our bicycles. It was beginning of November, perfect sunny and crisp day to cycle across London and spend a few hours around the park.

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I love the wilderness of Hyde park and we found chestnut trees near the North entrances on these wild looking fields. It didn’t take very long to find a dead branch and start to dislodge the beautiful spiky pods from the tree. After 15min or so the floor was covered with chestnuts that we happily picked up, with a proud smile on our faces.  DSCN4273

DSCN4290We found so many that day that I left the small ones behind and kept only the big chubby chestnuts to roast at home. We unfortunately don’t have a fireplace but they were still delicious roasted in the oven. Don’t forget to make a little incision in their skin carefully with a knife before cooking them to avoid chestnut explosions, fun to watch but very annoying to clean!

Fruit, nut and seed breakfast cake

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I call it breakfast cake because I love dipping it into my tea in the morning or at anytime of the day really. My husband likes it toasted with butter, I like it with Nutella or marmalade. This cake is the perfect start of the week end, no sugar and no fat added. The sweetness comes from the dry fruits and the binding agent comes from the tea, egg and porridge mixture. If you have a good quality non-stick loaf tin, you don’t even need to use fat for greasing! Choose your nuts carefully if you want to keep it low in calorie (almonds have the lowest calorie content).

This recipe is adapted from my BBC Good Food magazine (p90- Feb 2014). They use black tea, figs and wholemeal flour which gives a dark colour to the cake (see below). I loved that version but decided to give it my own twist.

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Ingredients for a 1L loaf tin:

  • 400ml of green tea
  • 50g porridge
  • 130g of chopped dried apricot
  • 120g of golden raisins, cranberries and raisins
  • 1 medium egg
  • 100g of mixed nuts (pistachios, whole almonds, brazil nuts and walnut)
  • 200g of self raising flower
  • 1 tsp of baking powder
  • 25g of pumpkin seed (some more for the topping)
  • Pecan nuts, poppy, sesame seeds for topping

Turn the fan oven at 150°C. Mix the porridge, apricot and raisin/berry mixture to the tea in a large bowl and leave to cool. In a separate bowl, mix all the dry ingredients and keep the spare seeds and nuts aside for topping at the end. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well. Fill your loaf tin and bake for 1h. Cover then with foil and bake for an extra 10 minutes. Using normal flour and green tea really gives this cake a lighter colour and texture, and I love the orange and green flecks randomly distributed. The recipe in the magazine says it keeps 1 month wrapped in the fridge, but at home it barely lasts a few days so I never had the chance to test the storage advice…

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My mother in law drinks Red Bush tea and I love the fresh fruity but still dark taste of this tea. That will be my next fruit cake I’ll bake and I will post a picture as soon as it comes out of the oven!