Biscotti (cinnamon and raisin)

This morning I was leafing through Baking Illustrated and noticing how many of the bread recipes in there that I wanted to try require a "sponge" started to be prepped the day before. I'm looking forward to giving that a try, but this was a new book! I wanted some immediate gratification.

So eventually I came across the biscotti recipe, and thought that would be nice with coffee. I went with the lemon anise recipe, which required two eggs (the others required three), which is all the eggs we had left. We didn't have any anise, but it suggested substitutions, and I went with cinnamon and raisin and hazarded the amounts to add. I really wanted to try out cardamom, which I thought Jake would enjoy, but if my first batch of biscotti came out weird, I wanted it to be for technical reasons, rather than bad spice choices.

The dough was very, very powdery, and I wasn't convinced it was supposed to be so powdery. It required a certain amount of packing before it formed anything like the logs of dough that were needed, and I felt pretty sure it was all doomed to failure. The recipe didn't describe what the dough was supposed to look or feel like, but it did suggest flouring your hands, which was completely unnecessary.

They're cooling on the rack right now -- they didn't brown as much as I might have wanted, and from the uneven coloring I suspect that I should have left them in for a bit longer on the first part of the bake. I haven't tasted them yet, except for biscotti residue when flipping them over, but that certainly tasted good enough. And they do look like, you know, biscotti. (UPDATE: And, now that I've tasted them, they taste pretty great! The raisins got all burnt, which I dig.)

This was also the first time I got to try out parchment paper, which is, of course, dreamy.

Posted by chris at September 15, 2004 02:00 AM