Sweet chestnut and chocolate biscotti

I have been out in NZ where it is autumn.  Sweet chestnuts were falling from the trees in the park around where my Mum plays croquet.  Eating chestnuts has never been a tradition with any of the Kiwis that I grew up with and it seems that they have over the years simply been swept up by the road sweeper and the bloke who mows the grass under the trees.

In recent years there has been an influx of itinerant workers from the Far East and they have brought with them some wonderful new food attitudes, including eating sweet chestnuts.  So the chestnuts are collected but it remained a mystery to most of the locals what you might do with a chestnut to make it edible.

So here we go.  I scrounged up a bag of them which amounted to about half a kilogram once boiled and shelled (see below), whizzed them to a damp powder in the blender and proceeded to make this recipe

http://en.julskitchen.com/dessert/chestnut-chocolate-cookies
And Juls presents it so much better than I do so follow the link.  Just one word of warning her recipe uses chestnut flour, what I produced was damp chestnut powder - the texture of the end biscotti was superbe but the mix was too damp to begin with and needed extra flour.  I also added pistachios to my mixture.

To shell sweet chestnuts, cut the shell on their rounded side and either bake them in an oven at 180 degrees C for about 20 minutes, or boil them for about 20 minutes, and then keep them hot while you pull both layers of the shells off.  Much easier to do it you can keep them warm.