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Chocolate Hazelnut and Lemon Poppy seed Biscotti Sunday, December 09, 2018, 08:07 AM

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This is part one. See part two. I’m making more next week. They are all based on my dad's recipe

Chocolate Hazelnut

This is as much a post-mortem as it is a description. The plan was the use some Nutella. The main changes were to:

• Use Hazelnuts for the nuts
• Use 1/2 cup of Nutella in the wet ingredients
• 1/4 cup cacao powder
• Reduce the oil to 2 Tbsp (Added one more later, see below).

Well, the dough came out super, super thick. It was hard to work with but was also extra sticky. I was able to easily spread it and form it and it barely spread! As it was mixing, I added an extra tbsp of oil when it was mixing but that didn't help much.

I also opted to not chop of the hazelnuts since they are super round and I didn't want them to roll around. Well, I think that also made it harder to cut through. They got torn as I was trying to cut them.

And cutting them was extra hard because they weren't cooked enough on the first bake! You can really see in the pictures that they needed more time. So, in the end, I also had to cut them really thick. (I hadn't yet changed cutting strategies as noted in Lemon Poppy seed below).

And I did the toast step for longer (and upped the temp later). I think this was fine though they are pretty hard and pretty dense! (They didn't spread much in the first bake...)

I think they were pretty flavor though. You couldn't taste much in the batter but the final cookies had more flavor.

I think, between this and the pumpkin biscotti experiment, I should not mess with the amount of fat regardless of what I add!

Lemon Poppy seed

I made the noted change on the recipe to double (or more!) the lemon zest and juice. I ended up using the zest of four (small) lemons and the juice from 2.5 of them. It came together nicely (and the extra time mixing that we added to the recipe helped).

The real thing I discovered was that I do not like the serrated knife for cutting. I had much better luck with a sharp Santoku. I would still slide the knife to get an initial cut and then I could press down. This worked especially well for these ones since they do not have cherries or nuts to also cut through.

Other Notes and Tips

I used my dad's air-bake cookie trays for the first time with this. I liked that I didn't have to worry about them burning and I really liked that I could slide the loaves off the tray. Since I had only two trays and was planning two batches at a time, I always used one of the trays for either the loaves or the bottom tray when toasting. When I was in "batch mode", I baked the loves in the single upper-oven and toasted in the bottom!