For some reason, everyone seems to be in the mood for biscotti. So here’s the recipe I use. These make very crisp crunchy biscotti that are best dunked in hot coffee, tea, or chocolate.

Almond Chocolate Biscotti

Recipe calls for almonds; I almost never have almonds, so use walnuts. I usually make half a without nuts for my grandmother.

3 eggs
1 cup sugar
½ tsp vanilla
1 ¼ cup toasted almonds, coarsely chopped
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
7 oz bittersweet chocolate chopped into chunks (I used 1 ½ cups Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips)

Preheat oven 350 F

Whip the eggs, sugar and vanilla until the mixture thickens (It says it should hold its shape. Mine didn’t and were fine.)

Sift together flour, baking powder, add to egg mixture. Stir in nuts and chocolate.

Line baking sheet with parchment paper (my silicone baking sheets were perfect for this.) Form dough into two logs ~3” wide and almost the length of the baking sheet. Dampen hands and smooth each log.

Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven and lower oven temperature to 300 F. Let biscotti logs cool a few minutes.

Remove logs from pan. With serrated knife (bread knife works best I think) slice the logs diagonally into ½ inch slices.

Place sliced cookies flat on baking sheets (you’ll need two) and bake 20 more minutes. Cool and store in an airtight container for up to a week. Biscotti also freeze extremely well.

from Room for Dessert by David Lebovitz

How to end a difficult day.

Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet Brownies (from Cookies and Brownies * OOP)

6 tbs unsalted butter
3 oz bittersweet chocolate
3 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup flour
2/3 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 325.

Butter a square 9″x9″ baking pan, and line up two sides with parchment paper.

In double broiler, melt chocolate and butter. As soon as chocolate and butter are melted, remove from pot from heat. Add sugar and stir well. Add vanilla and salt and stir well. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring. Add one cup flour and stir until incorporated. Add nuts; batter should start to pull away from the sides of the pan.
Bake 30 to 40 minutes, until brownies *just* start to pull away from the edge of the pan.

Cool one hour.

If eating while warm, a scoop of vanilla ice cream is perfect.

* This is one of my favorite cookbooks. It’s relatively short, but every recipe I’ve tried is perfect. And judging by the Amazon website, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

It’s 17.8 degrees outside. It’s Sunday, but secretly Saturday (I don’t have to work tomorrow) and even with the wood stove cranking out lots of heat, there’s just a chill in the air.

So what’s someone to do in a situation like this?

(more…)

Today’s accomplishments:

Peanut Butter Blossoms
M&M Cookies (with and without walnuts)
Pumpkin Spice Cookies (with and without walnuts)
Pumpkin Whoopie Pies*
Sugar Cookies

* Actually made and taste-tested

Those are added to:
Lemon Sugar Coins
Spice Cookies
Nutmeg Sour Cream Cookies
Sugar Cookies

Plus, for my Mom’s birthday I made:
Carrot Cake cupcakes (with and without pecans)
No-bake Lemon Cheesecake

What I have left:
Bar cookies of multiple types
Walnut cookies
Rugelach
Anything else I decide looks good

What I am doing differently this year is making all the dough, scooping out balls for those cookies that are not shaped cookies, and the freezing the uncooked balls. This way, I can simply bake cookies as needed, giving me fresh cookies for the entire holiday season, instead of a freezer full of cookies that become more and more damaged as the holiday season progresses. (I scooped out the cookies, froze them on a cookie try, and then put them into ziplock bags.)

Of course I finished making all this cookie dough, and then decided that I was really in the mood for oreos. I did not, however, make any oreos.

I had two packages waiting for me when I got home. A mystery I’ve been waiting months for, and Alice Medrich’s newest book, Chocolate Holidays: Unforgettable Desserts for Every Season

After a few seconds of indecision, I grabbed Chocolate Holidays and curled up on the sofa.

Yum!

My entire house smells of chocolate.

I’m visiting family tomorrow, so this evening I made homemade oreos (every time I’ve made these someone has requested the recipe) and chocolate chocolate chip cookies, from the The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book.

I used four different kids of chocolate between the two recipes; cocoa, dutch process cocoa, semi-sweet chocolate chips, bittersweet chocolate.

Because if you’re going to have dessert, then HAVE dessert and make it worth the calories.

And at some point I still need to make scones to put in the freezer to bake and have hot one weekend morning.

Yum.

Last year I picked up the All American Dessert Cookbook, which has gorgeous pictures and interesting bits to go along with the recipes. But more importantly, it has some very delicious recipes. I’ve been trying recipes over the past couple months, and I have to say that everything I’ve tried has been good.

So, for my birthday I decided to try the Molten Chocolate Lava Souffle Cakes. I figured, the best way to get the kind of cake I wanted was to make it myself.

Wow. Words cannot describe how delicious they were.

And, they were relatively easy to make, and I could make them ahead of time, and then put them in the oven when we were ready for dessert.

The drawback was that the recipe called for 16 oz of bittersweet chocolate, 2 sticks of butter, five eggs and an additional egg yolk.

But they were totally worth it.

When you put your fork into one of the cakes, the gooey melted chocolate in the center oozed it, and with fresh whipped cream…

(contented sigh)

Plus, I made sugar cookies with strawberry icing, made from fresh strawberries.

After all, my birthday only comes once a year.