Biscotti means twice baked cookie and that’s exactly how you make these crunchy delights. Last week I was out for tea with a good friend and we shared a piece of biscotti. It made me realize that I hadn’t made a batch in a really long time. So I went straight to our recipes at canolaeatwell.com and found our original recipe. The recipe included eggs and I quickly realized that I didn’t have any eggs in my fridge and really, really wanted to make biscotti. So, here’s a new Cranberry Almond Biscotti that I’d like to share with you.
Start by preparing your pan. I like to use parchment paper for a non-stick easy clean up. I recently learned a great trick to keep that parchment from rolling up on your pan – you get it wet! Yes, take that piece of paper and run it under the tap and then wring it out. Now you can smooth out the piece of parchment on your pan and it won’t try to jump onto the floor.
Here is parchment trying to jump on the floor and parchment nicely pressed to the pan.
Now that you have your pan prepared its time to combine all of the dry ingredients. For this recipe I’ve used sliced almonds with the skin on. Some packages call them sliced natural almonds. I like the colour, texture and flavour the skin adds to the recipe.
When you measure the brown sugar make sure you pack it in tight. You should be able to turn your brown surgar out onto a plate and have it keep the form of your measuring cup. If you can’t, then you didn’t pack it hard enough and you risk that the recipe will not turn out the same as the picture.
This recipe calls for dried cranberries. If you buy them in a large bag make sure they they are not in a big clump. You will want to seperate them with your fingers before adding them to the bowl.
You need to make sure that you mix the dry ingredients together so that you do not have any lumps of brown sugar. It should look like this picture.
Mix the wet ingredients together in a seperate bowl and then add them to the dry mixture. Mix until the dough starts to come together. It will be dry and crumbly. This is ok. Now it’s time to get messy. Push up your sleves and use your hands to squish the dough together and form a ball.
Once the dough starts to form a ball, split it into two and shape them into logs.
Press the logs out until they are about 5 inches wide and 1/2 an inch thick. You will want the two flattened logs to be about 2 inches apart in the pan so that they don’t bake together. Once flattened take a knife and score into 15 pieces each. The photo below shows only 10 per log and I found them to be a bit too thick althought my husband just loved them.
Now it’s time to bake. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 F. Then you need to take the pan out of the oven, let it sit for 5 minutes, cut along your score lines and turn the slices on their sides.
Return the pan to the oven for 10 minutes, take it out, turn the biscotti over and bake for another 5 minutes. Now you have Biscotti!
I decided to add a bit of melted white chocolate to this batch. I used 1/2 cup of white chocolate chips and melted it with 2 tsp of canola oil. The canola oil helps to melt the chocolate and give it a smooth texture.
I poured the melted chocolate into a resealable bag and cut the corner from the bag. This allowed me to pipe on the chocolate.
You can find a printer friendly version of this recipe here or I’ve included it below in this post.
Eat Well…Jenn
