  Biscotti All'anaci Today I'm trying a new recipe. Well, new to me. Biscotti has been around for a damn long time, some biscotti more than others. So I have a delightful loaf baking away in my oven right now, which I've sprinkled with cinnamon. Those of you not familiar with such ethnic foodstuffs may recognize biscotti as being those horrible dessicated cookielike items at your local coffee shop. But they don't have to be that way.
Unlike scones which are a black hole of moisture and could drain Loch Ness if anyone decided they really wanted to solve that mystery once and for all, biscotti are intentionally dunkable coffee cookies. You even bake them twice to get that "dunk me! " imperative feel. Trying this recipe is inspired by a few things. One, my old man had a fabulous Italian baking phase several years ago that I miss fiercely. He's a kickass cook, my old man, and I got this recipe from him.
Two, I've started driving my boss at the bike shop to work, and he's a Paisan', so I'm taking pity on him from an ethnic wasteland point of view and planning to occasionally feed him treats from the homeland while he's a guest in my car. I know what you're thinking: the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. I assure you, gentle reader, that if I were to list the organs of his I was most interested in, neither of those two would top it. But today's entry is not about lust, it's about another fine Italian tradition: biscotti. Third, biscotti is a flour-heavy number that doesn't require a lot of rising, so I figured it'd make the jump to a delightful high-altitude recipe without much adaptation at all. So here's the old-a fam'ly ray-cipi: ************** 2 eggs 5/8 c sugar 1 1/4 c pastry or cake flour (not all-purpose flour!
) 1 tsp. anise seeds or flavoring Put eggs and sugar in a bowl, beat 10 minutes. Add flour slowly, blending gently. Add anise flavoring. Butter and flour a loaf pan 4" wide. Put batter in.
Bake at 375 for 20 minutes. Remove from pan, leaving oven on. Cut loaf into 1" slices. Put slices on buttered baking dish. Brown slices on one side, then the other, about 5 minutes each side. Makes about 20.
Finish with powdered sugar or lemon rind if desired. These can also be made as drop cookies, omitting the second baking. *************** This is interesting stuff. The first phase yields a sort of fluffy sugar-egg deal which expands seemingly beyond its own mass, but the flour brings it back down while making the batter much heavier. The first baking yields a poundcakey sort of deal that seems pretty appealing just the way it is. Maybe I'll omit the second baking sometime.
Rather than anise, this time I'm using a vanilla nut extract and a little cinnamon. We'll see how it goes. I do love to bake, I just rarely have the time these days, and Phillip is not into sweets, leaving me to either find people to feed or eat it all myself. Well, I must dash--time to flip the slices! 
