Honey Almond Biscotti – a delicately flavored, crunchy Italian cookie that is perfect proportioned for dunking into your coffee.  In my experience store-bought biscotti has always been hit or miss with a tendency to be cloyingly sweet and hard enough to break your teeth.  In direct contrast homemade biscotti can be crisp, crunchy, come in a range of flavors, and most importantly be chock full of nuts, dried fruit, or chocolate.  They also have a fairly long (for a cookie) shelf life seeing as the only fat and most of the moisture comes from the eggs.

The main challenge to homemade biscotti is the double baking of it.  You start out baking the biscotti as a large log and halfway through the baking process you must pull it out a slice it before returning it to the oven.  You want the biscotti to by baked enough to hold its form when sliced, but you also want to pull it out before the dough has dried out the point that it will start to crumble as you slice.  With a little practice though baking biscotti is a breeze!

Honey Almond Biscotti

Recipe makes about a dozen biscotti.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups Flour
• 1 cup Almond Meal
• 1/2 cup Honey
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 1 tbsp Anise Seeds
• 1 tbsp Almond Extract
• 3 Eggs
• 3/4 cup Almond slices
• 1 cup Powdered Sugar (for icing glaze)
• the juice from 1/2 of a Lemon (for icing glaze)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Combine all of the dry ingredients, except for the almond slices and the powdered sugar.
3. Beat in the eggs, honey, and almond extract.
4. Incorporate the almond slices.
5. Form dough into a long (~ 12′), wide (~4′), flat (~1′) log, and place it on a parchment lined baking sheet.  This can be a challenge since the dough has a tendency to be dry and crumbly.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes.  The dough should still have a slight give to it when you pull it out of the oven.
7. Allow the log to cool for another 20 minutes.
8. Cut the log into individual slices of biscotti.
9. Return the biscotti to the oven to finish cooking for another 20 minutes.  Remember to flip your biscotti halfway through so that both sides cook evenly, and make sure the biscotti is fully dried before removing it from the oven.  The honey in this recipe, while flavorful, adds another level of moisture to the dough that needs to be baked out in order to get that crisp biscotti crunch.
10. Remove form oven and cool for at least an hour before icing.
11. Combine the powdered sugar and lemon juice into a thick, goopy glaze.  You want it to be runny enough to drizzle, but thick enough that it won’t fully drip down the sides.
12. Stand your biscotti up on there sides, and arrange them on a piece of parchment or wax paper.  I used the same parchment paper I baked them on in a bid to conserve waste.
13. Drizzle the glaze over the biscotti.
14. Allow the glaze to fully dry before packing the biscotti away – it can take a few hours.