Dessert Course: Babbo Castagnaccio

August 22, 2025 · Posted in Cookbook

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Dessert Course: Babbo Castagnaccio

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Babbo Castagnaccio
Chestnut Cake from Babbo Cookbook.

Notes: Like many other recipes from the Babbo Cookbook, it was love at first site: Castagnaccio. This cake, made of chestnut flour, is essentially a fruitcake. It is very dense and sticky and full of dried fruits and nuts.

The recipe intrigued me because it starts off with the hesitant warning that Castignaccio is definitely an "acquired taste." (You can read more about he history of this cake on Babbo’s website.) T

The use of chestnut flour and chestnut honey caught my eye. I had all of the ingredients except the chestnut flour in my pantry. I canvassed all the markets in my hometown (Kansas City), and found nothing. Not even D&D or Whole Foods stocked the item. I took advantage of a recent trip to New York to fetch some from Little Italy. What I failed to also find, were candied orange peel, which I ended up substituting in half the amount of candied ginger.

The recipe calls for: chestnut flour, chesnut honey, golden raisins, dried cherries, candied orange peel (again, I substituted candied ginger), walnuts, pine nuts, eggs, a bit of sugar and olive oil. I was not prepared for the consitency of the batter. To say that it was sticky is an understatement. The recipe instructs that you "pat the batter" with wet hands into a prepared baking dish.

The cake turned out wonderfully, although it was rather dense and sticky toward the center; I think it may have needed a bit more time in the oven. It’s much more like fruitcake than regular cake. The cake is glazed with a chestnut honey syrup right out of the oven to keep the top moist.

Chestnut flour as a very particular smell – very similar to the taste of chestnut honey, if you are familiar with that. I can see how the true (i.e. unadapted) recipe would be an acquired taste. I served this with a home-made orange-ginger ice cream.

wifi diagram, pulled from the pages of Recipes for a 5-Star Library MaintainIT Cookbook

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If you want to read the rest of this chapter on Setting Up Wireless at your library, visit www.maintainitproject.org/node/240#CB2 and check out Chapter One!