Well, it's almost Groundhog Day, really. With all the snow that the Midwest has been experiencing lately, I thought that today would be a perfect day to hibernate in my apartment and make delicious baked goods. Mostly, this has been a good plan, as I have been looking out the window to increasingly high drifts of snow (I ventured forth around 3 pm to take out the garbage and experienced the feeling of wind hitting my face like thousands of icy needles; I have not been brave enough to go outside since). The only flaw in my plan has been that I just used up all the sugar making biscotti, which means no more baked goods, at least, until the snow clears. Has anyone else noticed that people keep combining the word snow and Armageddon or catastrophe? Neither snowmagedon or snowtastrophe are words, people! That's why we call it a Blizzard. (For the record, it has snowed a bunch, but not enough for this disaster-speak. Maybe we get one of those tomorrow?)
Correction: I wrote this before we recieved the next 20 inches of snow. It was a Blizzard!
Correction: I wrote this before we recieved the next 20 inches of snow. It was a Blizzard!
Biscotti
When most of us consider the tasty biscotti, we imagine coffee shops and Italian cafes. However, the biscotti got its start with the Romans, as a convenient, nourishing, travel food for soldiers. The cakes were baked once to cook their ingredients and a second time to dry them out completely. In this way, the cakes would last for many weeks without going bad (think Roman-style Twinkies). It wasn’t until centuries later, during the Renaissance, that bakers thought of the cakes as yummy desserts.
In Tuscany (birthplace of the biscotti) bakers added the common almond to the cake batter with delicious results. As the biscotti was spread throughout Italy by merchants and travelers, it became immensely popular, with each region developing a recipe featuring local flavors and ingredients. Today you can find biscotti of many flavors, with different dried fruits and nuts and covered in chocolate or sugar glazes. They are enjoyed most commonly with coffee or Vin Santo, an Italian dessert wine (a practice started by the Renaissance Italians).
As a big coffee fan (specifically espresso) I have tasted a variety of biscotti cookies at restaurants and cafes. I've found most of them to be slightly stale, but had never thought about making my own until I crossed this recipe while idly surfing the net. It's really very simple to put together; I added dried cranberries and chopped pecans instead of pistachio nuts to the dough (chopping the nuts coarsely really helps when you go slice the biscotti loaf after it's first baking). Then instead of baking the dough on parchment paper (one of the things I forgot at the grocery store this week) I used a silicone baking sheet, which worked really well.
One of the reasons I like using www.allrecipes.com for cooking and baking is that other users post suggestions and variations on each recipe. For the biscotti, one user recommended covering one end of the cookies with chocolate, which I did (for half the cookies) and then rolled them in chopped pecans. I’m not sure which version of the cookie (chocolate-covered or not) I like better, but they are both delicious treats with coffee (and very fresh tasting!). Click here for more information on biscotti:
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