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.

Whoop whoop whoopie!!pie

After a bit of busy month I have finally had a chance to put together some more recipes from my recent baking episodes. I have had whoopie pie only once before. It’s an American cakey-cookie not always seen in UK cafe or shops.I totally loved the chocolatey delicious treats.  So I thought I will give it a go. Most classic whoopie pie recipes had marshmallow fluff for filling. Unfortunately I could not find any in the supermarkets in Edinburgh until very recently when I saw it in a  specialty shop.  But I did try making it on my own with marshmallows-that did not work!

This recipe has been adapted from joyofbaking.com

230 grams plain flour
75 grams cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp soda bicarbonate
1/4 tsp salt
150 grams granulated white sugar
170 grams butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/4 cup buttermilk
Instant coffee in  120 ml of warm water

Pre-heat the fan oven to 190°C. You might need to adjust the temperature according to your oven.

For buttermilk, since I did not have any and was not too keen to go out and buy some, I made a quick homemade buttermilk. In 1/4 cup of milk I added about a tsp of lemon juice and let it stand for 10 minutes.

Then add the coffee to the buttermilk.

Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, soda bicarbonate and salt together.
Get the butter to room temperature. Add sugar to it and with a hand mixer, beat it till the mixture is light and fluffy.

Now add the egg and beat it in. Then in three portions, beat in the flour mixture alternating with the coffee-buttermilk till everything is mixed smoothly.

Using an ice-cream scoop, drop about a tablespoon of the mixture on the baking sheet lined tray. Smooth the top with moistened finger.

Space the dough out on the baking tray.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 10-15 minutes or till a skewer comes out clean. Let cool on a wire rack.

The cookies should spring back upon pressing when done.

So for the filling, as I said I did try to make marshmallow fluff by microwaving marshmallows. It melted but when I tried to spread it onto the pies it was just sticky and stretchy. So I made some basic chocolate buttercream and spread it on the flat side of one cookie and sandwich it to the flat side of another.

The whoopie pies were moist and crumbly and chocolatey and yummy 🙂 whooopiiee for that!!

.....then only the crumbs remain 😀

I went an extra step to make things more chocolatey…dipped the pies in melted chocolate!

Thanks for stopping by!