Chocolate Biscotti

This post is all about the making of chocolate biscotti.  Biscotti are a type of Italian cookie that is baked twice.  They are often eaten with coffee.

This particular recipe once again comes from the Culinary Institute of America’s Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft.  Normally the recipe’s in this book need to be halved or quartered to make in a home kitchen.  However, this particular recipe needs no adjustments.

Here is the mise en place for the biscotti.  I’ve chosen to omit the almond extract since I’m not a fan of almonds.

Here are the “wet” ingredients.  They include the instant espresso powder and sugar.

The dry ingredients go into a separate bowl.

And then they get mixed until uniform.  Technically they should be sifted together, but here I’ve just mixed it together with a fork.

The chocolate gets chopped into small chunks.  Once again, I’ve chosen Callebaut dark chocolate.

The wet ingredients, then, get mixed together with the wire whip attachment until they get a little frothy and lighten up in color considerably.

The dry ingredients get mixed in a third at a time until just incorporated.  Then the chocolate chunks should be folded in.  The mixture won’t seem very thick by sight, but when mixing by hand and when removing from the bowl it will seem very thick and heavy.

The mixture should be arranged on a nonstick surface for baking.  I’ve used a silpat, but some parchment would do nicely.  You should try to make your dough longer and thinner than I have made it here.  It should be as wide as you want your final biscotti to be long.

After baking in the oven for an hour, the biscotti are ready to come out.  Let it cool for a few minutes, and then cut it into strips about half and inch wide.

Then arrange them on their side back on the cookie sheet.  You will probably need at least two cookie sheets for this part.  They should bake again for about 12 minutes then get flipped over and bake again.

Once they are done, they should be very dry.  When they have cooled they can be enjoyed as is or would go nicely with cup of strong coffee.

Chocolate Cake

This time around I decided to make some chocolate cake.  No special recipe here, just used the standard cake recipe out of a Betty Croker cookbook.

My mise en place for the cake.  I’ve got two different cocoas here for the cake, not because it’s better that way or I intended to do so, but rather I was running out of the Sharffen Berger cocoa, so has to fall back on the Hershey’s.

Here’s the cocoa for the cake.

Mixing the dry ingredients together first.

Then everything goes into the bowl and gets mixed.

Scraping down the sides of the bowl and ready to put into the pans.

Cake batter gets distributed between the pans.  I should have weighed them to make sure they were even, but I forgot to weigh by mixing bowl before hand to be able to figure out how much batter I had in the end.  They ended up a little uneven, but it still turned out pretty well.

Close up of the batter in a pan.

The smaller of the two pans after baking.

Close up of the vampire bite in the cake.  It’s where I was testing for doneness with a toothpick.

The larger of the two cakes came out of the oven.

Close up of the larger cake.

De-panning of the cakes.  They are still warm at this point, so they go back onto the wire racks.

The cake got a interesting diamond pattern on the top of it since I had it upside down twice on it’s top.

Side view of the cake.  (aside, I’m not sure why but I love this picture).

While the cakes are cooling, time to make the frosting.  I decided to make a chocolate buttercream.  It starts with soften butter and powdered sugar.

Some chocolate gets melted in a double boiler for the frosting.  I’m using some good quality ~60% cocoa Callebaut chocolate here.

Some strong coffee for the frosting.  I was going for a mocha buttercream, but it needed some work as you couldn’t taste the coffee at all by the end of it.

The chocolate is finally melted.

Everything gets mixed together and whipped up.  Some cream is slowly added until the consistency is correct.

Preparing the cake board to receive the cake.  I’ve got a few pieces of parchment paper laid down to keep the cake board clean while frosting the cake.

The larger of the two cakes goes down, and the top is removed with a sharp bread knife.  The top is removed to flatten it out since it gets a slightly mounded top while baking.  Also, it gives the baker something to snack on and without having to take a piece of the final cake.

A close up of the topped cake.

Some frosting goes on top of the first cake.  Followed by the other cake, which also gets its top removed.  Finally it all gets frosted.  I should have taken a few pictures of that process, but got too involved and forgot about the camera.

A close up shot of the finished frosting.