Chocolate Almond Biscotti

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Hey there! I’m Grace, a college friend of Liz and Amanda. I was so excited to be invited to their Tiny Dinner Party last Saturday night and even more excited to be asked to write a guest post for fooDCrave. For appetizers our friend Abby made crostini three ways, and for the main course, Liz & Amanda made beef brasato with fresh papardelle & rosemary. Going with the Italian theme, I made biscotti for dessert. It's also a perfect recipe to make for your valentine tonight!

I used my cousin’s personal recipe for chocolate almond biscotti. You will need:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs (large, not extra large)

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2  1/4 cups all purpose flour

1  1/2  teaspoons baking powder

1/4  teaspoon salt

1 cup chocolate chips

1 cup toasted slivered almonds

Preheat the oven to 325. To start, I creamed the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. If you have a standing mixer, use that. If you’re like me and haven’t gotten married yet, you can use a hand mixer and a deep bowl or even a pot (I had to improvise, I wasn’t cooking in my own kitchen).

Then add the eggs one at a time and the vanilla and blend until smooth. This is what heaven looks like!

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Then, use your mixer to blend the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients, make sure not to over beat. When that was done, I toasted the almonds in a pan on medium heat until fragrant and golden.

I then mixed the almonds and chocolate chips in a bowl. The chocolate chips promptly melted. Woops! Moral of the story: if you want chocolate chip biscotti, and not chocolate biscotti, toast and COOL your almonds ahead of time. Or don’t toast them. Your call.

Fold in the almonds and chocolate with the batter and place on a lightly floured surface.

Divide in two and knead each ball a few times and then shape into two slightly flattened logs about 2 inches wide, 1 inch high and 12 to 14 inches long on a non-stick baking sheet covered in parchment paper. 

This is where the process gets a bit long. So, start an episode of whatever has been hanging out on your DVR. This is also a good time to lick the beaters and maybe do the dishes.

Bake the biscotti for 25 minutes or until barely golden. Take out and place on a rack to cool for 10 minutes. This is what mine looked like:

Once cooled, slice diagonally into ½ inch thick pieces and bake again for 20 minutes.

At the 8-10 minute mark, carefully flip each piece over 180 degrees and put back in the oven for 8-10 minutes. When you take them out they shouldn’t be too dark.

We served the biscotti with coffee, but it was Saturday night, so we also had some of this (it's Prosecco, in case you can't tell!):