For May 19

 Slowly catching up....

This week, a new recipe and an old one.  Very different, both delicious:

Linzer Cookie Bars

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

The Linzer Cookie Bars are, well, bars that are an adaptation of Linzer cookies (which, I guess, are themselves an adaptation of Linzertorte).  Anyway, a shortbread style crust, a raspberry-lemon layer, and then some crumbled topping.  Good stuff!  I have never made anything in the linzer family before, so this was a fun recipe to make.  They ended up looking quite pretty, and the flavors are quite nice - almond (quite a bit of almond meal in the crust), raspberry and lemon (quite a bit of zest in the raspberry layer).  A nice change of pace.

The second recipe this week was an old friend.  I am very fond of the combination of chocolate and hazelnut, that addiction of the Europeans.  Maybe it is genetically coded?  I don't know, but I do know that these are a standout biscotti - Andrew says that they are, along with a gingerbread biscotti recipe I made years ago and have not been able to replicate ever since, the best biscotti I have ever made.  I may have to agree with him on this one - I really liked these a lot - good thing I tripled the recipe!

This recipe comes out of the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, a wonderful and enormous cookie baking book.  In the book, they have two different basic biscotti recipes, one for "European" style biscotti (read:  hardtack) and one for "American" style biscotti (read:  this is the one I use).  The American one is less dense and includes some butter.  While most commercial American biscotti are largely nasty, overly sweet monstrosities, this recipe is great.  After the base recipes, there are pages and pages of variations, as well as important and useful tips to make your biscotti even better.  One tip:  replace some portion of your flour with nut flours or meals.  That is what I did with this recipe, replacing 1/3 of the flour with hazelnut meal.  It adds tremendous richness of flavor to the biscotti.  According to the King Arthur Flour folks, you can replace up to about 50% of your flour with nut flour.  While they tend to be pricey (and you need to store them in the refrigerator if you have extra), they are great at adding flavor to your biscotti.  I recommend them highly.  Oh, and it always helps to use good quality chocolate - preferably, hand cut your chocolate from blocks, instead of using chocolate chips.  Chocolate chips tend to be made with low quality chocolate.  I much prefer to hand cut my chocolate, which leads to lots of shards and uneven sizes, which gives the finished biscotti (as well as chocolate chip cookies, for which I do the same thing) a lot of visual interest.  Try it!

And one final note about making biscotti - biscotti means "twice baked", and describes how they are made.  First, you make the dough, and then spread it as a log on your cookie sheet and bake it for aroune 25 minutes.  Then you remove it, let it cool, slice the log into 1" slices or so, separate them to the heat can reach the sliced surfaces, then bake them again.  In making the initial logs, you basically dump spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet, and then you need to form it into a log.  Here is my tip to you:  if you run your hands under cold water, you can then easily form the log using your hands directly.  Otherwise, it is a terrible mess.  But through the miracle of cold, wet hands, it is easy!

Now that you have my secrets "in hand," so to speak, go forth and bake!