Another birthday: Pink-Iced Biscotti

Put these two pictures together and this is what I made:

Appetizing, I know.

Frosting freezes just fine and I'm not one to throw out a cup of butter. So when I had tons of leftover frosting from my roommate's birthday cupcake-cake I put it in the freezer until another birthday rolled around. Inevitably, one did. I was going to make a cake. I had recipes out and everything, but then I got working on an Ayurvedic food interview and editing takes an age...

So I ran out of cake-making time. What I had left was biscotti - the quintessence of biscotti, mind you: Almond Chocolate-Spiked Biscotti. Like the birthday cupcakes for my roommate, however, I couldn't quite figure out to go about giving someone 4 biscotti as a cake replacement. A birthday isn't a birthday without an iced cake.

Well, I figured you can ice biscotti. You see it all the time. They get dipped in chocolate or coated in sticky things that harden and are delicious. So that's what I did. My icing was defrosting slowly, so it wasn't too liquid like it had been before. I foolishly thought it might stay that way.

How do you dip biscotti in frosting? The unforeseen problem was that frosting is not melted chocolate. Any idiot know that, right? I dipped, and nothing held. My biscotti came out of the leftover beet buttercream frosting completely naked. So I tried with a tool.

A knife would help me create a coating. But then there were all these weird ends. It was more like spreading hummus on a carrot stick than icing a cake. I at least stopped icing about 2/3rds of the way up the biscotti so there would be something to hold on to, but by now I could foresee the inevitable disaster. I had to somehow make it from my house to a subway station halfway across the city carrying these biscotti in my granny grocery cart, then trek with said cart to a farmers' market before ending up at a BBQ (the one that lead to the discovery of Joy the Baker) about 10 blocks away. Hopefully at the BBQ I could rid myself (I mean 'give') of the iced biscotti to the birthday girl.

The thing about Montreal metros is that the city isn't flat, so a lot of the stations have a lot of stairs. The subway cars themselves certainly aren't going to go up and down. That's a roller coaster, not a subway. Imagine that...

The other thing about the Montreal metros is that they were constructed before anyone thought that it would be a good idea to install elevators to make them all wheelchair accessible, and somehow they still get away with this. Where are the petitions and lobby groups, from both people with reduced mobility and people with enhanced mobility (traveling with bikes)?

My granny cart is rugged, but that's a lot of bumping around and lifting and carrying and rolling, and by the time I got to the farmers' market I'd stopped checking my cart to make sure the biscotti were okay. I knew they weren't. The frosting was melting and oozing and the biscotti looked like long rocks that had the misfortune to drown in something slimy and pink.

But I got there. I arrived at the BBQ with a laden cart from the farmers' market; eggplant, lettuce, half a watermelon, tomatoes, tomatillos, cilantro, and red onions. Jean, my tomato, corn, raspberries and now watermelon guy and I had a chat. It was comforting. Ritual, and all. Buried under this produce was my dinner in tupperware and the biscotti, worse for wear.

Then, you know what? The birthday girl didn't even come. I'm not sure if she reads this, but if she does, I'm not angry. It was her birthday and you can't be angry at someone on their birthday. I also had a fair-trade hand-made card from...well I got it at 10,000 Villages but forget the country of origin. The paper is artisanal and thick and beautiful and she'll still receive that the next time I see her, but the biscotti...they met their end. My roommate got birthday cake #2. I figured since he'd enjoyed the first one so much (or suffered through it silently) he may appreciate more beet buttercream. He may have. He didn't say either way, nice fellow that he is. I hope my new roommate is so kind. Oh, yes, I have a new roommate. He has no idea what he's getting himself into. I suppose he could be reading this, but again, I doubt it. This post is rather long. In fact, if you're still reading this I invite you to tell me when it's your birthday and I will personally make you a GREAT, from-scratch birthday cake with absolutely 0% beets. The frosting will not ooze or spread and it will have candles, not a match or biscotti.

Birthdays are so great, aren't they?

Because I Can Never Decide Which Cookies To Make: Chocolate Studded Almond Biscotti and Oatmeal Cookies

I've been eating too many fresh fruits and vegetables. I feel like I've been on a diet of soft foods. Sure, they're delicious and fresh and I know I'm doing good things for my body by eating them, but my teeth need more work! I need strong flavour! So I knew I wanted to make biscotti. That way I could finish a meal with a satisfying crackle and crunch. I don't drink coffee but I knew that dipped in plain, bitter yogurt the sweetness of the biscotti would marry well with the tang, especially when made with bittersweet chocolate. I didn't want a lot of sugar, but I wanted a mildly sweet treat.

Okay, fine, so that's decided, I thought.

Nope, I also saw a recipe for oatmeal cookies and I'd been dreaming of soft chewy cookies for awhile. I wanted the chew of oatmeal and the density, not the air of plain chocolate chip cookies. I didn't want any fruit messing with the flavour. All I needed was a plain oatmeal cookie.

So I made both. It's been so long since I've baked, and it's so good for the soul. There's nothing like a fresh cookie to make looking for a roommate better. You probably don't believe me. I counted today; I've lived with 28 people in the last 6 years. 3 men, 25 women. I've had enough roommates. My next roommate will be #29, and if I make it to 30 I'll feel much older in terms of living experiences than the number. Perhaps I'll have an early midlife roommate crisis. Perhaps I'm already having one.

This is why I needed to spend a few hours baking in my kitchen. Emotional therapy.

These are amazing biscotti. They're from my favourite chocolate book, Alice Medrich's "Chocolate and Art of Low-Fat Desserts". My mother bought an extra used copy online (it's discontinued) just so that I don't have to lug it home in my suitcase whenever I go home. That's how much I love this book. It includes everything from ridiculous buches de Noel, 5 different mousses, cakes, creams to petite sweets - quarter-sized cookies, meringues and haystacks. There is, of course, an exceptional biscotti recipe. There are, in fact, three, and I sort of combined the first two to create my perfect snack.

Chocolate Spiked Biscotti:
2 cups flour (I used my gluten-free flour blend, which worked perfectly in these and less perfectly in the oatmeal cookies I made later)
1 tsp baking soda
1 square of bittersweet baking chocolate, grated
1/4 tsp salt (I feel like I added too much, because my cookies taste way too deliciously salty. It could just be that I used fleur de sel so the little salt rocks explode in the bites where my teeth find them)
2 eggs
3/4 cup cane sugar
1 tbsp molasses (the recipe calles for about 1/2 a cup of white sugar and 1/2 of dark, but white sugar just has more of the nutrients from molasses - the brown in brown sugar - taken out of it, so it's an easy fix)
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup ground toasted, blanched almonds (Oh, for more info on toasting nuts, check my bittersweet chocolate truffle hazelnut mousse torte recipe)

I think because I used fleur de sel and cane sugar the biscotti turned out grainier than expected, but it was actually so perfect since they helped the crunch. I love it. Dipping these in coffee to soften them would be a sin. Well,in a few days when they're a bit more rock hard it may be a necessity, but freshly hardened, they're perfect.

I whisked the flour, salt, baking soda and grated chocolate. Grating the chocolate was annoying, since I grated it very finely. What was good about it, though, was that it was so difficult I decided to only do one square of it instead of two, keeping the fat down. It was just chocolate-y enough, especially when eaten right after an oatmeal cookie. Actually, then it seemed VERY chocolate-y. You could also coarsely chop the chocolate but then it doesn't go as far. You don't get chocolate in every bite. So there's a balance.

In a large mixing bowl I then beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. None of this "3 minutes until pale" business. Medrich gets right down to it and just says "util combined". Apparently biscotti aren't so fussy. You're not going for perfect cake texture. They're intentionally supposed to be tough. These are hardy cookies. No frills, just exceptional flavour. Then I stirred in the flour until combined (you can also beat, if you don't mind flour flying everywhere), and then added the nuts. Stir, stir, stir. Actually, I more so folded with a whisk, but as long as it gets combined it'll be just fine.

I preheated the oven to 300 Fahrenheit and lined my cookie tray with aluminum foil. Then I shaped the cookie dough into three long logs on the tray. They're supposed to go lengthwise and stay about 2 1/2 inches apart, but my cookie sheet isn't big enough for that. I figured it didn't really matter because these didn't have to be gorgeous cookies, and if they flowed into each other, well, I could live with that. I can live with a lot of things. A bad roommate is not one of them.

So these long logs are kind of like freshly planted gardens. Spiked with chocolate and almonds and in 35 minutes they'll come out of the oven as fully-grown cookies. That's where the fun starts. Biscotti means "twice-baked" in Italian. It also just means "cookie", since this is generally what they eat as a cookie. Not so much into the oatmeal raisin thing. This is only the first baking stage. Some vegetables and planted things can be eaten raw, but many need to be cooked, or re-baked, like these biscotti. I did eat one after 35 minutes to see what they were like, and they were very much like a cookie, but not quite yet like the crunch I was craving.

So the logs came off the aluminum foil, got cooled for 10 minutes, got carefully sliced back apart (they had baked into each other a little, but not irreparably so), and got sliced into 1/2 inch slices.

This is where Medrich assumes you read all her biscotti recipes before making one. I've made biscotti before, and generally you slice them on the diagonal to make the pieces longer. The biscotti you see in coffee shops are ridiculously long and are the equivalent of 3 biscotti, but even so, these biscotti become prettier when cut diagonally. One of her biscotti recipes says to cut on the diagonal and the other doesn't. I was surprised not to see it in the first, and didn't check the second. It really doesn't make a big difference, besides an aesthetic one. Now it also says to place the cookies on the oven rack. I did a double take. Put the cookies directly on the oven racks? Well it didn't say "directly", but the next line said "or arrange slices on two baking sheets" and bake them for half the time, rotate, flip front to back, top to bottom, fuss, fuss, fuss. So I figured I'd go with the less fuss step of baking directly on the oven rack. By the way, the rack should be on the bottom of the oven. I put it on the second bottom rung because the very bottom seemed bizarre. Actually one of the recipes didn't even specify where the rack should be. In the other recipe it did say explicitly to put the cookies "directly" on the oven rack. I don't know why publishers don't employ the copy and paste function of their computers when it would help a poor baker out.

Anyway, on the racks the slices went, carefully placed one by one. The oven was still "on" and hot, so I did this all very carefully. It's not great for the back. I miraculously didn't burn myself. 20 minutes later the cookies were carefully removed from the oven one by one. Medrich gives a trick (in one recipe only, of course) to take one cookie out when the timer goes and leave the rest in for another minute or 2. Once the removed cookie is cooled you can test it. If it's crunchy enough then you can take all the cookies out. If not, leave them all in there for another few minutes. Repeat test procedure. This can get dangerous, for both the tongue and waistline. Don't rush the testing or you'll burn your mouth, and call it quits when the sugar rush kicks in. It shouldn't go longer than 5 minutes, this whole "extra baking time" business.

Now the important thing is to cool the cookies completely before storing. If they get stored while they're still hot they'll soften up. NOTE! THERE IS NO BUTTER IN THESE COOKIES!!! and because they're so dry, they last for WEEKS at room temperature in a sealed container. I also just noticed that Alice and I agree on alternatives serving methods for the cookies. She thinks a scoop of yogurt is a lovely idea (though she specifies a "really pretty coffee cup" for presentation. Apparently yogurt is nothing special on its own. She is not French or Greek, it seems. She also think coffee should get poured around the yogurt. I agree with her that it's a great topping for frozen yogurt or non-fruity gelato, but one idea I didn't foresee was crushing them and pressing them against the sides of a cheesecake or iced cake (the iced cake is my addition, what we the fact that I don't eat a whole lot of cheesecake). Alice, we're a good team, you and I. You probably already have a roommate, right?