As much as I love chestnuts, I don’t have a lot of recipes that contain them. So when I found myself just snacking on a jar of them, I decided I’d research some cookies and found a recipe by Smitten Kitchen. As it turns out, she adapted the recipe originally from Epicurious who posted the basis for them as “Mexican Wedding Cakes”. This actually very much resembled these vanilla kipferl cookies that my great-grandmother used to make, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I also was a bit ahead since I had chestnuts already in a jar.
I never have luck roasting chestnuts… the ones that aren’t rotten are usually impossible to get out of the shell. Much easier to buy them already done (even if they are crazy expensive).
This recipe, luckily, is made for those maddening pieces of chestnuts because the first thing you do is chop them up…
Then stick them in a food processor to pulverize them. (You can also do this by hand and then mix everything with a hand or stand mixer)
Into a fine nutty crumb.
To which you then add soften butter until you have a whipped delicious mound of buttery chestnut paste in your food processor.
Then you add some freshly grated nutmeg (or the powdered if you don’t have a fresh nut on hand)
And some powdered sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon, salt, and flour.
Which forms a lovely dough.
That you then separate in half and wrap in plastic. You can then put it into the fridge for at least an hour (mine wound up staying there for about half a day). Why do you have to chill them? Because otherwise you have a melty buttery mess on your hands… literally.
Once the dough is chilled, you can remove one ball of dough at a time and start rolling 2 teaspoon sized balls.
Then you pop them in the oven for 14-17 minutes. SmittenKitchen noted that they over-bake easily, so when after the 20 minute mark mine still hadn’t even started to brown… I got nervous. I left them in for about another 3 minutes before calling it. I rolled them over to see that they had just barely begun to brown on the bottom. (And they weren’t too dry, but I could see how they could get there quickly… and my oven seems to always take just a little longer than recipes call for anyway).
You then let them cool for about 5 minutes, and then toss them in a mixture of cinnamon and powdered sugar to coat them all the way around.
Then they cool completely on a rack (okay… and you eat a few while they are warm).
I actually kept hoping that they would get a little better as they cooled. They were good, but not chestnutty enough for my taste (the sugar seemed to overpower the chestnut flavor) and actually wound up reminding me of Dunkin Donuts powdered sugar munchkins (not in a good way). I think next time I will up the chestnut ratio and lower the flour ratio. I also may try to coat them in a mixture of powdered & white sugar with the cinnamon.
You can check out the original recipe here.
And for anyone keeping track… yes… I am addicted to chestnuts. I think I shall call this the Winter of Obsessive Chestnut Nomming.
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