Recipe : Almond Biscotti

Have you ever had a biscotti before? 

Well, usually when people bring these in and lay them out to share, I will avoid them. They are dry, and  crusty. 

I tried a scone once, that was gross.  And they look similar to a biscotti - dry, crusty.  My niece ate a scone once, she said it was good.  She is a kid, what does she know anyways?

At any rate, a lady at work brought in some Almond Biscotti back in December, and she came to my desk and said, "Please have one, I made these to share for Christmas."  I mean, what was I going to say? No?  Yeah right, so I took one.

Eventually I had some down time for some mindless eating.  Which would probably be why I am a chubster.  And I ate it.  It was mighty tasty!!

So tasty, that I asked her for the recipe.  And she sent it over.  I have been holding on to it ever since.

Until today! 

I made them.  They are just as delicious as I remembered.  Never you mind that I *might* have dropped a loaf on the floor.  Good thing I swept and cleaned the kitchen prior to starting any baking today.  I think I might make this a habit, for instances such as this.

The thing about biscotti, is you have to bake (and cool) them twice.  Once to firm them up, and once after cutting, to dry them out.

The recipe is pretty simple, the only really special things you need are the extracts.  Almond and orange extracts.  Oh, and the almonds, in the event you didn't have sliced almonds on hand.

Almond Biscotti

So basically what you do is you whip the eggs and sugar together, while this is happening, combine all the dry ingredients (including finely chopped almonds) in a separate bowl.  Once the eggs are a light/pale yellow color - trust me it does get there after about 5 minutes - then you start adding the flour mixture, slowly so it does not create a HUGE flour cloud.

After you get it all together, you plop it down on a flat floured surface and knead a little extra flour into it, and throw it in a couple of loaf pans, bake it, let it cool on a rack, and then cut it into slices, put it on a baking tray, cook for another 12 minutes, let them cool completely, and then BAM! You have biscotti that is perfect to enjoy while you are drinking coffee on a lazy morning.  You can find the recipe here, or check out my recipe page and see the other tasty morsels I have on there.

If you wanted to be real fancy, you could melt some chocolate and dip an end into it and let it cool, and enjoy with that little bit of fun too!

If you have tried the Biscotti Mocha at your local Caribou Coffee house, this tastes just like the crumbled biscotti they have on top.  I swear.  Super delish!

I am planning on bringing them to the nursing home. I am visiting the Hubster's Grandma B back in his hometown.  Taking a little mini-road trip, his buddy owns an Auto Shop, and is going to do an alignment on my car, and some other miscellaneous work, so I figured I could visit her while I wait.  When I was growing up, that's what you did.  When you happened to be in town, you stopped by and visit.

Generally you didn't call before you stopped in, and well, Grandma B doesn't really go out, so the chances of her being there are high, but I wanted her to invite me to eat lunch. So I called, and asked what time lunch was, she said 'dinner' was at 12, I said I would stop by around 1, she said, well you could come by at 12:30, I said sure not a problem (sad face).  Then she said, well would you like to have lunch here? I said, "If there is space at tehe table, I would be more than happy to join you." (SCORE!!)   She said she would let the staff know, that she would have a guest!

Hopefully it isn't gruel serving day.

***

Side note, I was at the gym for 2 hours today.  Yeah, for realz.  I did week 2 day 2 (W2D2) of the Couch to 5K program (C25K), a Body Works + Abs class, and some more treadmill and some shooting some B-Ball.  With the estimated calories burned on my LiveStrong.com Daily Plate, I burned approximately 864 calories.

And based on what I shoved in my face for the rest of the day, I still have 837 calories I *could* consume, and still stay under 1,134 for the day.

So basically a super win! :)

***

Microwave Caramels

Ohhhhh Pintrest, you are a semi-ridiculous obsession.  If you have not heard of Pintrest, man are you lucky.  Basically what it is, is an online corkboard where you 'pin' things you like.  You can have what I imagine are an unlimited amount of boards. 

A few boards that I have are: Dinner, Let's Do Lunch, Breakfast, Drink Up, Spook-tac-u-lar, Bake Me A Cake, and Winter Wonderland.  They are pretty obvious what I have been pinning to each board.  Basically items that would fall into dinner ideas, get pinned to Dinner, lunch to the Lunch board, and Halloween items to the Spook-tac-u-lar board.  Pretty simp - right?  And super addicting.

I literally can waste about an hour a day on that site, on my nifty little iPhone.  If you know anyone that has a Pintrest account, they can attest, that they waste so much time on it.

Well one day back in March or something I came across a Pin for Microwave Caramels that I pinned to my 'Treat Time' board.  Takes only 6 minutes and five ingredients, and you don't have to fuss with a thermometer.  Perfect, because I don't own one of those anyways. 

So I started out, and I swear I always screw up when a recipe calls for x cups of butter.  Plus I hate when it does not indicate if it's salted or unsalted butter.  I know when you bake, generally you use unsalted, but why can't you just indicate if I should be using salted or unsalted butter in the recipe!!! Shoot.. 

At any rate the recipe calls for a 1/4 cup of butter.  I look at the package it says blah blah 1/4 cup of butter.  Perfect.  So I put the whole stick in.

I start melting the butter and the rest of the ingredients.  And at the 3 minute mark, it looks like there is an awful lot of butter in it, what an oil slick.  I have made taffy and caramel before, and I know this is not going to form a cohesive substance no matter how long I have this in the microwave or let cool.  So I scratch my head and think to myself, Self, what the heck went wrong here....  let's look at this again.. okay, 1/4 cup of butter. I re-read the stick of butter, 4 tbs = 1/4 cup, okay.  Look at the stick again.. oh.... there are 8 tbs in a stick.  Why the heck didn't they just say 1/2 stick of butter!!!

SHOOT. Gosh.  Man, sometimes I wish I could comprehend things better.  Well, let's double this biotch.  So I dump in the rest of the ingredients again, to make it double.  And start heating/stirring it up.  I cooked it a little longer because I needed to make sure it all got hot enough to the boiling or whatever that traditional caramels need... and then I decided I would put some in a couple of silicone ice trays that I had that were in the shapes of stars.  Well, doy.  Of course I am going to burn myself with the extremely hot caramel, why wouldn't I? I mean, I have been doing so well with this super simple recipe so far.

Once I have 12 little silicone stars filled, I dump the rest into the buttered 8 x 8 Pyrex, and throw them all in the fridge.  Other people said they wouldn't leave it in there for 20 minutes, so I kept checking them to see if they were hardened enough. 

Uh. No.  I checked at every 5 minutes for an hour.  They were not hard enough.  Then I moved to checking at every half hour. After 2 hours, they were not solid enough.  I would cut through them with a knife, and they were never solid enough to keep the cuts visible.  So I left them overnight, and put the silicone trays in the freezer.

This morning I checked on them, they were sort of ready?  I pulled them out and cut them, and took each piece out, and layed them seperately on a piece of plastic wrap.  And threw them back in the freezer, because I could see they were wanting to relax, spread out again.

Caramels after being in the freezer all day.

They taste good.  I mean, they are soft.  I think it would be super delish to put over ice cream, or throw on some popcorn, well, maybe the popcorn will be too messy yet, since it never really set up.  But it's good, put it in your coffee for a lovely caramel coffee treat.  But yeah, not worth trying to wrap up in individuals.  Too many things went wrong with this to tell if it's user error, or what.  Plus it's in a microwave, and microwaves vary greatly.

Try a different recipe that I have previously posted, check out the ones that are not a fail in my book.

I might make this and then a fudge sauce and then put them in some jars, and give as Christmas gifts or something for an ice cream topping gift.  It really would be good.

The silicones?  I threw them away, caramel stuff and all.

So.  Fail for what I wanted them to be.  But success for ice cream or coffee.  Have you tried this recipe?

*Update*  I dipped the frozen caramels in melted chocolate, to see if the chocolate would hold them together to make them something you could put in a dish or something, it sort of worked, I should have made sure I had a thick coating on them.  The caramel was soft like in a Milky Way bar.