Lenox Almond Biscotti

Making the Almond Biscotti for this week's Tuesday's with Dorie recipe was a lot of fun. It had never even occurred to me to make biscotti from scratch before, and there is nothing that I enjoy more than cooking something brand new. Thank you Gretchen for forcing me out of my comfort zone! (the recipe has been posted on Gretchen's blog here.)

I decided to make half of the batch as the recipe directed, and the other half I made with vanilla extract and macadamia nuts.




Forming the logs ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. The dough was extremely sticky, and I didn't manage to get them as skinny as the recipe called for. They ended up being about 3 inches wide, instead of an inch and a half.

One of the things that really surprised me was how much the dough spread out on the cookie sheet while baking. The logs ended up almost doubling in size during the initial baking.

After the second baking, I decided to melt some semi-sweet chocolate to go with the macadamia nut biscotti. I dipped one side of them in the chocolate once they had cooled down. These ended up looking really cute and tasting delicious.

I liked the macadamia nut ones, but I didn't really care for the almond biscotti. The almond extract was a little overwhelming in the final product. In the future I will definitely try these with other kinds of nuts and ingredients (dried cranberries maybe?).

Yum! My mouth is watering already!