Italian Cooking & Language Blog

Fare La Scarpetta means to wipe your plate clean with a piece of bread.

What else could you ask for?

Monday, May 21, 2012

Twice Cooked Cookies: King Arthur Flour's Cranberry (Orange) Biscotti



Biscotti aren’t the easiest or fastest cookies to prepare.

First, a blog-interruption for a quick Italian lesson:

The past participle of cucinare (to cook) is cotto (“cooked,” as in, “She had already cooked dinner when you knocked on the door .”) A biscotto is a twice-cooked cookie. You probably want to dip more than one biscotto in your coffee, which means you now have multiple biscotti.

It is easy to eat more than one cookie, but it can be tiresome to cook one, or more, cookies twice. I’ve baked biscotti a few times and was often annoyed by the loaf falling apart before I sliced it and how long it took to bake them a second time.

So, while I generally think you can prepare most things from scratch, King Arthur Flour’s Cranberry Orange Mix was super easy to prepare. And delicious! The dough was even delicious raw, which I tasted despite fear of illness (sorry, Ma.)

I didn’t add orange zest, which means my biscotti were only cranberry (not orange), but they were wonderful nonetheless. I made two loaves instead of the one recommended by the box (as my husband always says, I refuse to follow a recipe exactly). I had no trouble slicing the cooled loaf and, if we had a bigger oven so I could bake both cookie sheets at once, it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour and fifteen minutes or so, from start to finish. And in-between steps, there was time to look up King Arthur Flour recipes online.


Full Disclosure: I received the mix for review from King Arthur Flour (thank you!); I was not compensated for this post. All opinions here are entirely my own.

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