Pistachio & Chocolate Biscotti + A Giveaway

mbakes turned three last month! We’re nearly out of the annoying toddler stage and hopefully; the recipes aren’t as clumsy anymore. Pair the diabolical explosions of sugar I used to post back in ’12 + 13 with my nighttime flash photography, and it makes me want to cry and murder every cupcake on the planet. 

Aaaaand then there’s Jane Hornby, she’s been writing recipes professionally for 15 years and her new baking book What To Bake & How To Bake It came out recently. If you have years of recipe writing under your belt and a whole book containing mostly quintessentially British recipes within, that’s enough to draw me in. The glorious book might be aimed at the amateur baker, but there's no harm in adding a collection of stable recipes to your collection (15 years = stable recipes, okay?). WTB&HTBI felt genuine, much more so than a book by a celebrity chef, whose home economist likely thought up/tested the recipes and then stuck a coy image of said celeb chef on the front cover to push the sale of copies, isn’t that annoying? 

What’s the USP, I hear you ask? (You’re not asking this), it might be the photography, which kind of reminds me of Ikea. Each recipe (there’s 50 of them, including pumpkin pie and JAFFA marble cake) comes with beautiful overhead step-by-step photographs from start to finish.  This recipe for pistachio chocolate chip biscotti is an adaptation from the pistachio and fig version in the book, every recipe in here is meant to be simple, so I chose the simplest of the lot, to see how good Jane’s ‘simple’ was, and my oh my, Jane’s simple is simply delicious, crunchy and not at all eggy. 

To celebrate three years, Phaidon have kindly offered two copies of What To Bake & How To Bake It for me to giveaway. To enter, follow the instructions on the rafflecopter below. You can only enter if you live in the UK, don’t hate me!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Pistachio & Chocolate Biscotti

Ingredients

• 200g unrefined caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 300g plain flour, plus extra for dusting and rolling
• 1 tsp baking powder 
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• Zest of 1 orange 


• 100g shelled pistachios 
• 100g dark chocolate chips

Method

1. Grease and line a large baking tray with baking parchment. Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F. 
2. Put the sugar and eggs in a large bowl and whisk for 1 minute, until the mixture is frothy and pale, then whisk in the melted butter. 
3. Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt then dump over the eggs. Use a spatula to fold together to make a dough. Add the zest, nuts and chocolate and stir into the dough using the spatula. 
4. Scatter a generous amount of flour on the work surface and turn the dough out onto it. Split the dough in two and dust each one with more flour. Shape and lightly pat each piece into an 8-10 inch sausage, taking care not to overwork. Gently lift each piece onto the baking tray, bake for 30 minutes then leave to cool on a wire rack and reduce the oven to 160 C / 320 F.
5. Use a serrated knife to slice into 1cm pieces, then spread the cookies on the lined baking tray and bake for another 30 minutes, turning them over half way through baking so both sides are golden. Cool the biscotti on a rack, or eat warm, they'll last for 2 weeks in a cookie jar.

Love Em xx