Chocolate chestnut brownies

Last September, for my birthday, a friend gave me a little tin of that delicious French chestnut purée. I’m not usually one for leaving delights like that in the cupboard, but for some reason I hadn’t got round to using it.

So, this weekend, I was determined to come up with something chestnutty. Obviously, the perfect accompaniment to chestnuts is chocolate (well, it’s obvious to me), and, as I also had a bar of 100% pure cacao sitting around, I started searching my recipes for something that combined the two.

When it comes to baking, my first port of call is always Leith’s Baking Bible, and once again, it didn’t let me down. The recipe I actually found was for chocolate peanut butter brownies, but I thought the chestnut purée would be a perfectly workable substitute for the peanut butter.

Brownies always work best when they’re slightly undercooked, so they stay good and moist in the middle. If anything, the purée added to that moistness, and the resulting squares of chocolatey unctuousness really stick to the roof of your mouth – a surefire sign of a good brownie, in my books!