Gluten free cranberry and hazlenut biscotti

These hazlenut biscotti have a warm, complex flavour with a lighter texture than my usual biscotti.  They have a hint of cinnamon but if you want a spicier flavour just add more spice, perhaps with mixed spice or ginger as well as the cinnamon.  If you like an iced biscotti, making a glace icing with icing sugar and ginger wine would work well.

Ingredients
150g hazlenuts, toasted, skins scruffled off and lightly chopped
150g pine kernals, lightly toasted
150g dried cranberries
250g sugar
150g ground almonds
150g flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla.

Set oven to 175C.

Mix the flours, sugar, baking powder and spice together.  Stir in the egg and vanilla.  It should make a stiffish dough.  Mix in chopped nuts, pine kernal and cranberries.  This can be hard work; I tend to just smush it all together with my hands.  If you are using a food mixer it should be easy but add the nuts with the machine on a very low setting or they will tend to fly out around the room.

Make four logs of the dough on two parchment lined baking sheets. Cook at 175C for about fifteen minutes.  The outside will be getting crisp but the middle will be gooey. Let the logs cool for a few minutes then cut into slices and rebake for another ten minutes or so. You can leave the biscotti between the two stages of cooking if that is more convenient- this will also make the biscotti more easy to handle.

Cool on a baking rack.  Store in airtight container.  These keep very well - I have kept them for a couple of months without any reduction in the quality.

really yummy accidental toffee biscotti- gluten free

I tried my usual biscotti recipe but using my standard flour a while ago.  I didn't like it as much as usual; the texture seemed rougher than usual.  Making my first batch of biscotti in my new flat I decided to go back to my usual mixture of urid, tapioca and almond for the biscotti. I went back to my source recipe, biscotti all a mandorle, in the River Cafe Cook Book Green, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.  As my new kitchen is tiny, and the oven is too small for my baking trays, I reduced the recipe to needing only one egg.  I made the mistake of not writing down the quantities I would need, and what with dividing the flour quantity in two and then in thirds for the three flours I use, adding dried blueberries and cranberries, and generally getting in a tizzy because I couldn't find where I had put things like sugar, I made a mistake in the ingredients.  I forgot to halve the sugar.

When I mixed the dough I found I needed to add water to get a formable dough.  This was odd, as usually there is egg left over.  However, I added a bit of water and just carried on.  The dough took much longer than usual to cook, but was getting too brown on the outside.  With double the cooking time, then cooling, slicing and rebaking, it did take quite a while, and my initial impression was that the biscotti was too sweet to be pleasant.

However, the biscotti have matured into a delicious soft and slightly chewy biscuit with bursts of tart flavour from the dried fruit.  Sticky, toffeeish, and very tempting....I am not sure if I will be able to bring myself to make this recipe exactly this way again, but made as a mixture which is dolloped in small mounds on a baking tin and cooked long and slow, it may well become a standard favourite.

Recipe
75g flaked almonds (hadn't any of the usual whole almonds)
50g pine kernals
250g sugar ( I used granulated golden)
150 flour (50g tapioca, 50g urid, 50g almond)
1/4 tsp baking powder
50g dried blueberries
50g dried cranberries
1 egg

Toast the almond flakes and pine kernels for a few minutes until just going golden.  Move onto a new tray to cool before using.  If you leave them on a hot tray they may scorch and will take longer to cool.

Mix all the dry ingredients together.  Mix the egg and use this to make a batter stiff enough to mould into a log shape.  Add a bit of water if needed.

Place on a baking sheet in a log shape- I use a silicon liner or parchment to make the process easier..  Cook for about 25 minutes at 150C. I found that caramel oozed out around the mixture.  Leave to cool, slice and return to the oven until they are fully cooked.

Place on a cooling rack.  Store in an air-tight container when cool.

Biscotti - gluten free. Double orange and orange and chocolate

chocolate orange biscotti (cup by local potter)

I regularly make biscotti but as they keep so well I realised I hadn't tried my standard flour mix with them - I used to make it with a mix of ground almonds, urid lentils and tapioca.  So, today, pouring with rain outside and nothing else that must be done...two biscotti recipes. I am going to follow the English habit of referring to 'biscotti' as both singular and plural - in effect as if it is a biscuit name.  Any Italians, sorry.

I base my biscotti on the biscotti alla mandorle from the River Cafe Cook Book Green, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, just swapping the flours, and adding anything else that pleases me to adjust the flavour.

Ingredients
150g whole blanched almonds, coarsely chopped
100g pine kernels
1 tsp vanilla
250g caster sugar
250g flour ( 40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
1 tsp baking powder
2 large eggs
finely grated zest 2 oranges

For recipe 1 I added 100g of crystallised orange peel I made last winter.  I just chopped this coarsely and added it with the chopped almonds.

For recipe 2 I added 100g of plain chocolate drops.  I use Callebaut Belgian chocolate.  I buy it in 2.5kg bags from my local trade store, and always have the white, milk, 54% and 70.4% chocolate drops in stock. I know, that makes a lot of chocolate to keep, but it is very easy to cook with and tastes very good.



Instructions

Heat oven to 180C fan

Chop the almonds coarsely and toast for a few minutes in the oven with the pine kernels to a toasty golden.  Watch out you don't let them burn, and tip them onto a cool dish when you take them out of the oven or they may overcook from the residual heat  in the tin.  Let them cool.  If you forget to do them first you can speed up the cooling by putting them in a large metal bowl in a tub of iced water.

Mix the flour, sugar and baking powder together.   Mix the wet ingredients (including zest) and add to the dry ingredients.  You will have to work quite hard to get them to mix- probably easier in a mixer but for some reason I have always done this by hand.

Mix in the (cooled) nuts and kernels.  Mix in the chopped crystallised peel or chocolate drops.

Shape into two long thin logs and place on a buttered sheet or preferably on a silicon sheet.

logs - first baking

Cook for 15 minutes until the dough is setting.  If it is too gooey to cut neatly put back in the oven for a few minutes.

Remove from the oven and cut into whatever size pieces you want.  I tend to make these quite small as normal store-bought biscotti size is too big for us when made with such rich ingredients.

The chocolate tended to smear when cutting.  If this will bother you try leaving the dough after this first setting until fully cooled and the chocolate has re-set.  I think if you then slice and re-bake you will get neat chocolate biscotti.  Anyone tried this?

Place back in the oven on their sides and bake for another five minutes, turn, and bake again.

slices - second baking

They should be lightly browned.  You can take them out earlier if you like a chewier biscotti, but we like them quite crisp, and it means they keep very well.

biscotti- double orange

biscotti -chocolate orange

Keep in an air-tight tin.  They last for months.  They make good handbag emergency food as they don't go off quickly when carried around for a few days, and the high protein content makes them satisfying.