The Sacred Art of Eating

Nothing like a bit of late night last minute cooking to really add the edge to a birthday gift. Last year I sliced garlic and chillies and ginger for the flavoured oils, and this year D and I decided to make Biscotti for my Dad’s birthday. The rational was that the recipe said they went very well with Limoncello (in fact it provided a do-it-yourself recipe). I knew my Dad really likes Limoncello and so there was a fair chance there’d be some in the house; failing that he was about to head to Italy for a skiing holiday so any absence could easily be remedied!

We used James Martin’s recipe for Apricot and Nut Biscotti. The great bit is the recipe is on the BBC Food Site (albeit with a slightly different name) so I can share it with you!

The instructions seemed a little faffy and vague, but in the event turned out to exactly describe what we did. Starting at approximately 10:45pm, you make up a slightly wet biscuit dough, and bake it in fat sausages. These flatten out in the oven to give long oval biccies. At about half eleven you then slice these into dead authentic biscotti shapes, and bake for a second time.

A little after midnight they are ready to cool, and then, by morning, eat-dead hard and crunchy but not inedible, and packed with fruit (apricots, dates, dried strawberries!!) and nuts (pistachios, almonds and hazelnuts). We’ve bits and pieces of ingredients left- half packets of nuts and so on- so I think we’ll probably make another batch with a more random mix of flavours to finish these up before they go stale. The recipe does yield a LOT of biccies though, so we might half the quantities. Or take some to work.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this recipe. As I said we went in blind, late at night after a third of a bottle of wine with no real idea of what we were doing, and the results were just dandy. And don’t they look the part? Perfect gift food!

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