Gastronomy612′s Weblog

I already wrote up on scones, and now is the time for biscotti, another fine breakfast treat, or a treat to go with your coffee or tea.  I actually detest hard cookies.  I want a soft, but not so-soft-it’s-falling apart-in-your-hands-soft cookie if I am going to indulge for a dessert.  So why would I choose a twice baked cookie?  I don’t know.

The book I got the recipe out of, 500 Cookies says that, biscotti can be served alongside sorbet as a dessert.  Your biscotti can bring you from breakfast to dinner dessert – imagine that!

I made some cranberry-almond biscotti Sunday night when my car said that the outside temperature was 97F…and I do not own an air conditioner. My oven and mixer were begging for attention, exclaiming that David’s grill got all sorts of use over the weekend, so I was nearly forced to assuage the inanimate objects in my kitchen, despite the heat.

I turned the oven up to 300F, and got all of my ingredients ready for the mixing.

2 cups flour

1 cup superfine sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

2 teaspoon vanilla extract

WTF is superfine sugar?  This book calls for it a lot, and at one time I too was confused, but I stopped crying, dried my eyes, blew my nose, and went to the internets to find out that superfine sugar is NOT granulated sugar, nor is it powdered sugar.  Rather, superfine sugar is just granulated sugar whose granuals are smaller, and probably just run through a the food processor on “pulse” a few times.  Some recipes refer to it as “baker’s sugar.”  The nice thing about superfine sugar is that it is more easily dissolved in any recipe and does not take long to be incorporated with the other ingredients.  Can you substitute superfine for granulated? Meh.  In some cases such as making a meringue, it is probably best to just use the superfine sugar that the recipe calls for, but in baking cookies, it probably doesn’t matter so much.

Together, I started out by mixing the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.  In a separate small bowl, I whisked together the eggs and vanilla extract.  While keeping my mixer on “stir” mode, I added the wet ingredients to the dry until it was all incorporated evenly, stopping only once to scrape the bottom that the paddle missed.

In my ingredient list, I did not mention the cranberries or almonds.  The recipe from which this comes suggests 1 cup (5oz) of almonds.  Use your own intuition.  I am not going to waste much time perfecting the amount of cranberries and almonds to add with a measuring cup, so I just eye it up until it has the proper ratio I desire.  A couple handfuls of cranberries and a small fist of almond shavings later, everything is blended.

I put parchment paper on one cookie sheet and emptied out about half of the batter on the sheet and formed it into a long oval shape, and did so with the rest, giving them a 3-4 inch space between the two.

Because it was so hot out, the dough seemed goopier than usual, but I feared not, because in the oven it went for 35-40 minutes.

After that 35-40 minutes, I took it out and cut it width wise into pieces about one inch wide, and then places the pieces back on the pan on its sides, meaning one of the cut sides was downward, facing the cookie sheet.

After 10-15 minutes, I again took out the cookie sheet and flipped the sliced biscotti on it’s otherwise and put it back in for 10-15 more minutes or until it looked golden-brown.  When it looks just right, pull it out of the oven and lay on a cooling rack.

All of this baking allows all of the moisture in the cookie be baked out, leaving us with a hardened little biscuit dying of thirst; the thirst of our coffee and tea.  So like my oven and mixer, I appease it each morning dipping it in my coffee and taking a big bite out of it.  I leave mine at work, making it especially nice to get in in the morning knowing I get to indulge so early.

check out the background here.