Not Quite Sure: Chocolate Chestnut Cake

I have some confessions to make. Nigella confessions.

1) I have been making cakes that I've already made.

2) I've been screwing them up.

Chocolate Banana for a birthday party and Chocolate Guiness for a dinner party. In both cases, the unsuspecting consumers said the cake was delicious, but they were wrong. The Chocolate Banana was undercooked and badly mixed (lumps of banana). The Chocolate Guiness was badly mixed and oddly bitter, perhaps due to badly mixed baking soda, but it seemed worse than that.

I know what the problem was: lack of patience. Mine. The same lack of patience that renders baked potatoes too hard and onions in the stirfry too crisp and pungent. The lack of patience that is hard to overcome, but lately I've been trying and the last several baked potatoes have been deliciously soft and moist. Clearly, though, I have to try harder on the cake mixing front.

So the stage was not well-set for Chocolate Chestnut Cake. And the difficulty of finding chestnut puree did not help. Nor did the fact that the chestnut puree I finally found had corn syrup in it, and the recipe specified unsweetened. Nor did the fact that the ingredient list called for 6 eggs, separated, but the recipe itself appeared only to make use of the egg whites (I read it many times, looking for the egg yolks, but they weren't there).

Usually I would ask S how to handle all these conundrums, but it was his birthday cake and asking him seemed unseemly. Plus he was at work. My sister was on the phone, though, providing much moral support, if little practical assistance.

I used the puree, corn syrup and all. I did not use the egg yolks. I mixed and folded patiently. Then it was time, according to the recipe, to pour the batter into the pan. But I did not have a pourable batter; I had a stiff batter that I scooped and patted into the pan, assuming it would rise and even out.

It rose a little, but it did not even out much. Nigella said 40-50 minutes. I checked at 40 and it did not seem done. I was patient. I checked at 45. I checked at 50. It was a little more done, and did not seem to be getting doner. It was not wet, but it was jiggly. Like jello. I took it out.

I hope I am communicating how stressful this all was.

It tasted OK. Rich, dense, chocolatey, not so chestnutty, really not that exciting.

But here's the thing. I THINK NIGELLA MADE A MISTAKE. And so does S, with whom I was able to share the entire saga, once we were eating the cake. I think if I'd added the egg yolks to the chestnut/butter mixture, after the melted chocolate and before the rum, it would have been pourable, it would have risen a bit more, it would have been lighter. My surmise is supported by the fact that in other recipes, Nigella specifies egg YOLKS or egg WHITES, so if she wrote eggs, separated, presumably she meant us to use the egg yolks AND the egg whites.