Chocolate and Toasted Almond Biscotti

I have been making quite few varied flavours of biscotti. I used to really like cake rusks  and found them perfect dunking accompaniment to tea or coffee, but biscotti are absolutely my new favourite, all the more as they are so versatile and there can be endless combinations of flavours. And yes I do get lead into the false sense of eating a not-so-unhealthy snack as it does not have any oil or fat (or only little of it as in this recipe) but it does have a fair amount of sugar. For the almond ones I used milk chocolates but any chocolate would be good. For this particular recipe I have used a little butter. The only difference I found between the ones I made previously (Hazelnut and chocolate biscotti) and these is that these were just a tad bit softer to bite than the other ones, which is due to the butter. They taste equally good though. 

(adapted from christinamarsigliese.com)

Ingredients:

250 g all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp salt
100 g whole, lightly toasted almond
85 g chopped chocolate
2 large eggs (give it a stir and keep a little bit, a tablespoon or so, of the egg aside to brush on top of the dough)
30 g light brown sugar
90 g granulated sugar
3 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp orange zest
½ tsp almond extract
1 egg beaten , to glaze

1. Pre heat the fan oven to 180 ˚C .
2. To toast the almonds, put them and a dry pan and roast them on medium heat, shaking the pan frequently, till they are lightly browned. Chop the almonds and keep them aside.
3. In another bowl, whisk flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt.
4. Melt butter and cool it. Add orange zest to it.
5. Beat egg and sugar till it is doubled in volume and pale in colour. It will take about a minute or so.
6. Add butter and almond extract to the egg mix.
7. Add flour mixture to the egg mixture and mix with a spatula till it comes together to form a dough.
8. Transfer the dough to a well floured surface and bring it together to form about a 12 inches by 3 ½ inches log. The dough is very sticky, so you just need to pat some flour on your hands and shape it. Brush with a beaten egg.
9. Bake the log on a baking sheet for about 21 minutes, till the dough is hard to touch and cracks appear on the surface.
10. Take the tray out and leave it to cool for 10 minutes. Reduce the temperature of oven to 135 ˚C.
11. Cut the log into ½ inches slices, use a serrated knife and saw back and forth to cut instead of pressing the knife down which will probably break off pieces of you cookie than cut it. Put the slices with cut side down on the tray and bake again for 5 minutes, turn them other side up and bake another 5 minutes so that both the sides are golden brown.

Cool on wire rack. When cooled, drizzle with melted chocolate. Let that cool and then store in air tight container for several weeks.

Mocha Macaron

Finally! I think I am al….most there …

I have been baking, rather trying to bake, macarons for a while now. I keep trying different recipes and so far none had really worked for me. Something so tiny, and with such simple ingredients, it is funny how tricky it is to make.  The problem I face most is that I usually get no-feet macarons, or really hard cookie sort of macarons. I think, with macarons, the recipe has to just strike with you, what suits your ingredients quality and your oven. For me, this recipe has worked the best so far.

You will need:

60 gm almond flour
15 gm cocoa
115 gm icing sugar
2 egg whites
50 gm caster sugar

1. In the food processor, using the blade attachment, whizz together the almond flour and icing sugar. Whizz for about 30 seconds, stop and scrap the sugar stuck to the sides and whizz again for another minute or so. You want to make the almond flour a little fine but do not over mix in the food processor as it will cause the oils from the almond flour to exude.
2. Sift the almond and sugar mixture.
3. In a clean grease free metal bowl, whip the egg whites till it form soft peaks. Now slowly add the caster sugar and whip till the egg white forms stiff peaks and the mixture is glossy.
4. Now add the almond mixture to the egg white mixture in 3 parts. Fold the mixture till it falls of the spatula in ribbons.
5. Line a baking tray with baking sheet. Put the mixture in a piping bag and pipe around an inch diameter macarons on the sheet. Now bang the tray on the table to get rid of air bubbles in the macarons. This recipe makes about 60-70 shells. Leave the macarons to dry for about an hour. To check if the macaron shells have dried, when touched, it should not stick to your finger.
6. Pre-heat the oven at 150 ˚C, for fan oven, while the macaron shells are drying.
7. Bake the macarons for about 10 minutes. Cool them on a wire rack.
8. So the questions is, how do you know your macaron is right (I am not saying perfect because I have still not made a perfect macaron!): They should have feet which are not protruding, macarons should be smooth and shiny on the top, they should not be hollow, the base should be smooth and when you bite into them, they should be chewy and crunchy.
9. Filled macarons need to be stored in fridge overnight for them to mature.

The base is smooth and flat.

Coffee buttercream filling:

50 gm butter at room temperature
1 cup icing sugar sifted
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp instant coffee
1 tbsp hot water

Add the hot water to coffee and dissolve. Let this cool.
Whip the butter for about 2-3 minutes. Add the icing sugar and whisk till the buttercream is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract and coffee mixture and whisk it to mix all together.

Pipe the buttercream filling on the base of a macaron shell and sandwich it with another shell. Pair them up and store in fridge.

Pipe the buttercream filling on the base and sandwich with another macaron shell.

So this batch of macarons came out brilliantly. The slight fault that there was, was that some of them had bigger air gaps. I think I might need to bake them at a little lower temperature next time.

As you can see there are hollow bits in the foot.

Let me know your mac stories!

Mocha Genoise Layer Cake

Hello hello!

Over two months now, about time to get back to my blog. June had been a hectic but incredibly exciting month. My parents were visiting us here in Scotland for a bit. We took them around to a few places around Scotland and a long weekend in London. I do love London, but mostly as a tourist, not sure I could cope with living there. And one of the most exciting things about London is the food culture. The variety of cuisines is amazing! I managed to make stops at the Laudrée in Covent Garden London for their famous macarons and also had amazing Japanese confectionery at Minamoto Kitchoan.

Having finally settled down into usual routine of work home and life, though I do miss my parents and all the travelling, but I happy to get more time to do some baking.

The first multi-layered decorated cake I made was for my husband’s birthday. It was a chocolate genoise cake with mocha caramel frosting. I had never made genoise cake before and I really liked how it came out, extremely light and spongy.

Chocolate genoise cake recipe:

3 tbsp clarified butter (heat the butter till it is clear liquid but do not burn)
1 tsp vanilla extract
65 gm plain flour
30 gm cocoa
4 eggs
135 gm granulated sugar

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 ˚C . I use fan oven so please adjust temperature according to your oven.
2. Sift flour and cocoa together and keep aside.
3. Boil some water in a pan and simmer. Combine eggs and sugar in another bowl and keep it over the simmering water and beat the egg sugar mixture till the egg mixture is lukewarm.
4. Then take the pan off the heat and keep beating the eggs till it triples in volume and it resembles softly whipped cream.
5. Now fold in the flour mixture in 3 parts.
6. Add the vanilla extract to the clarified butter.
7. Scoop out a bowl full of the flour egg mixture into the vanilla butter and fold in till butter is completely combined. Then fold this into the rest of the batter.
8. Divide the batter into 2 x 8” greased and lined cake tins and bake at 180 ˚C. It takes about 30 minutes or till the cake shrinks away from the sides and springs back on pressing.
9. Cool the cake on a wire rack.
10. This can be stored in fridge for couple of days.

And that is what I did. I had made 4 cakes a day before actually assembling it together and wrapped it in cling film once it was completely cooled, this I stored in fridge.

Genoise cake is very light and a bit dry. I moistened it with a coffee syrup. Dissolve 2-3 tsp of instant coffee, depending on how strong coffee flavoring you want, in ½ cup of hot water. Add 3 tsp of sugar to the syrup and stir to dissolve.

Unfortunately I had not made a note of the  mocha caramel frosting I made for this cake. You can use chocolate, caramel , butterscotch or just plain mocha frosting with this cake. I have previously used Mocha whipped cream frosting from joyofbaking.com and it will go brilliantly with this cake. Here is the recipe for the frosting:

1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3-4 tbsp granulated sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp instant coffee
240 ml whipping cream

In a cold bowl add the vanilla extract, sugar, cocoa and coffee. Add a splash of the cold whipping cream and mix to make a paste so that the coffee dissolves. Then add the rest of whipping cream and beat with a hand mixer till it forms soft peak.

To assemble the cake, except for the bottom face of the last cake, I brushed the top and bottom faces of all the cakes with the coffee syrup. A tip here, be liberal with the syrup soaking , I had not done it enough and hence my cake was a tad bit dry.

Then layer the cakes with icing between each layer, spread the frosting on the top and the sides to make it smooth. You can decorate as you want. I made a plain and white chocolate collar for this cake.

 

 

Thanks for stopping by!