Almond Biscotti

For the food fair, I decided to make the humble Italian biscuit, biscotti.

I first ate biscotti when I was 5 years old and my family had  moved to our new house. After we had settled in, the elderly couple next door came to welcome us with some homemade biscotti.

Being the greedy child I was, I ate one immediately, and crunch! These biscuits were a lot harder than I expected! Many years have passed since, but I still remember that first bite and have wanted to recreate it.

Initially, everything was going fine. I mixed the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients…but this dough was nothing like I had encountered before…

Dry and crumbly, I struggled to get the dough to stick. In my panic, I resorted to googling ‘how to fix dry biscotti dough’, and surprisingly, dry dough is normal! I did however, add a tablespoon of water to make my life a little easier and continued to knead.

Eventually, after putting in some elbow grease, I managed to form to oblong shapes and put them in the oven to bake.

To create the dry and crunchy qualities of biscotti, the dough has to be baked three times Once to set the dough, and then the dough is sliced up and baked again on either sides.These biscuits are simple to make, but boy do they sure take up a lot of time!

And the final result….

Success!

At the food fair, two girls tasted my cookies, both saying that they found the cookie very hard, but they liked how they could taste the almonds. Another girl calledalso commented that she would have liked some coffee to dip the biscuit into.

At the end of the day, I was pretty pleased with my results. Here’s the recipe I used 🙂