Baking Biscotti

I have good memories with biscotti.  It's not something that I eat very often, but just tasting a crumb of biscotti is enough to bring back memories of rainy days in cafes or snugly winter days at home with hot chocolate.  When I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, I was would often go to a cafe after work and have a hot drink and biscotti.

This Christmas we made two types of biscotti: double chocolate almond biscotti and dried cranberry & white chocolate biscotti.  Although both were delicious, I think I actually preferred the cranberry biscotti.  I snacked on way too much of it over the holidays!  Although it does take awhile to make biscotti (you have to double bake it, for one thing), it's actually not hard to get the knack of it. 

Click here for my tips for making perfect biscotti.

If you put the biscotti in an air-tight container, it will keep for a couple of weeks without any problem.  For a simple and stylish Christmas gift, we put biscotti in jars and gave them away.

Too Good For Pictures

The problem with sugar cookies is that everyone likes to make them, and nobody really likes to eat them. It's fun to roll the dough out and cut out shapes and then decorate them. Normally, though, we're left with loads of cookies that look fantastic, but sit on the counter for weeks until some one puts them in the bird feeder.

The other Saturday I was preparing a lesson for church the next day (I teach Sunday School). Miriam thought that I should bring cookies for my class, and both of the girls love helping me bake, so after I finished my preparations we made cookies. They wanted to use the cookie cutters, so we made sugar cookies. I wanted to make them more exciting, though, so I decided to make lavender sugar cookies.

It's very simple, but the results are impressive. I used my normal sugar cookie recipe, but I substituted lavender sugar for half of the sugar. Then, when we were decorating them, I ground up dried lavender flowers using a pestle and mortar, and added them to the icing. I wasn't sure if you would really be able to taste the difference, but it definitely added a delicious twist to a familiar food.

This recipe turned out to be too good for pictures. We ended up with a huge tray of cookies stacked about 5 deep, all cut into little people shapes and decorated. I thought that I would have plenty of time to take some great pictures of them, but I was wrong. The cookies were devoured within a day. They just seemed to disappear in my Sunday School class. So I'm very sorry that there are no pictures, but it has to be a good sign about the recipe when it is eaten too quickly to photograph.