Chestnut cake with chocolate icing

This week was a colleague's 30th birthday (happy birthday Alex!) so I thought I should bake a cake for him. But also because it had been a while since I had brought a cake to work and my colleagues were wondering whether and when I would bring a sweet next. So voilà here is the first cake of 2014: a chestnut cake covered with insane chocolate icing!

I love both chestnuts and chocolate and I think they go really well together (in crêpes too, you should try :-D ). Moreover, grocery shops were closed when I embarked on this new recipe but I remembered I had a pack of chestnut purée somewhere in my freezer that I had planned on using a few months back. The recipe is very straightforward, easy and quick to prepare. I recommend baking the cake in the morning or the night before because of the chocolate icing, but you can also have the cake without icing, the chestnut taste will come out even more. As note, the chocolate icing described below can be used on any cake or dessert, it melts in your mouth (alternatively you can also eat it on its own... mmm).

Ok I let you try it and let me know what you think! Enjoy !!!

Recipe for a 28-30 cm long cake:

200 g butter, room T
200 g sugar
4 eggyolks
4 eggwhites
250 g chestnut purée
150 g ground almonds
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp baking powder

Beat up the soft butter, add eggyolks and sugar and continue beating. Add chestnut purée, ground almonds and flour, mix. Beat up eggwhites in a separate bowl and incorporate them gently into the mix. Transfer to a buttered and floured cake form and draw a line in the length of the batter. Bake 50-55 min at 200C in the middle of the oven.

Chocolate icing

100 g dark cooking chocolate
85 g cream

15 g butter

1 tbsp powder sugar

Melt all the ingredients in a bain marie while gently mixing (alternatively warm up a sauce pan, add the ingredients and gently mix away from the fire, you don't want the chocolate to cook!). Cover the cooled cake with chocolate sauce and let the icing dry for a few hours (or minutes :-p ) before serving.