Maria’s sweet baked chestnut tortelli (tortelli dolci di castagne)

Instructions

1. First, make the chestnut puree. Place the dried chestnuts in a saucepan and just cover them with water. Add the orange and candied citron. If you don’t have the latter, then add a tablespoon of marmalade instead of the orange and lemon. Bring to a simmer and cook for 1 hour or so, until the chestnuts are tender. You may need to top the pan up with water occasionally. Remove from the heat and let them cool completely, then drain them and pass them through a food mill with the fruit. This is the best gadget for the job because the resulting puree is fluffy; a food processor gives a denser texture.
2. To make the orange sauce, bring a small pan of water with a pinch of salt to the boil, then add the peel and blanch for 5 minutes. Discard this water and repeat the blanching step, but this time with unsalted water. Throw away the water and dice the skin as finely as possible. Return the skin to the small pan, add the orange juice, sugar, sapa and rum and cook over a low heat for about 5 minutes until thick and syrupy. Remove from the heat and leave to cool.
3. To make the filling, mix the cold pureed chestnuts and orange sauce together in a bowl with the other ingredients. You can now leave this overnight, covered, in the fridge. If time is not on your side, crack on.
4. To make the dough, mix together the flour, baking powder, sugar, zests and salt in a large bowl. Add the lard and butter (or just 60 g butter) and rub the mix together with your fingertips to obtain a rough sandy consistency. Add the egg and knead the dough for 2 minutes until it holds together. If the dough has a hard time coming together, add a tablespoon of milk to help.
5. Cover the dough so it won’t dry out in the fridge, and chill it until it is firm (1–2 hours). You can make this the day before, put in the fridge and remove it for 40 minutes or so before rolling out, to allow it to come to room temperature.
6. Preheat the oven to 180°C and line two baking trays with parchment paper.
7. Roll out the chilled dough to a thickness of 2 mm and stamp out 30 rounds with a 7–8 cm diameter pastry cutter. Place a tsp of the filling in the middle of a disc and gently fold up the sides and hold it like a taco in one hand. Pleat a seam by alternately crimping one side over the other. Watch
   Maria’s video
   to see how she does it! If this is too complicated, it will still taste the same if you make half-moon shapes with a simple pinched-closed edge. Repeat with the remaining discs and filling. Place each tortello on a lined baking tray, suitably spaced out.
8. Bake the tortelli in the oven for 20 minutes, until they are nice and golden.
9. Remove from the oven and when they have cooled a bit, pour some sapa into a small bowl and either dunk or brush them with syrup.