Biscuits from Italy, via Japan...

Since last week I have been attempting to make Cantuccini. These are the hard, crunchy biscuits made with toasted almonds, known in the English-speaking world as 'biscotti'. Biscotti is the general word for biscuits in Italian, literally meaning 'twice cooked'.

I was working from a Japanese book - not a good place to start, you might think, after all what do the Japanese know about traditional Italian patisserie? Well, for a start probably more than the British... Actually, patisserie, along with indigenous cuisine, is taken very seriously in Japan. The Japanese are in many respects excellent imitators of foreign foods (though I'm the first to admit there are plenty of bastardisations of European dishes that could make your eyes roll back in your head), and there are some truly wonderful patisseries and bakeries, churning out everything from pretzels that wouldn't be sniffed at in Germany, to the Japanese favourite of continental sweets, the Choux à la Crème.

This book lives up to the Japanese reputation for efficiency and attention to detail; it devotes much time to explaining presentation methods, and even egg quantities are given by the gram; it is nothing if not thorough. So putting my complete faith in お菓子の学校 (okashi no gakko - subtitled école de pâtisserie) I set to work. My sister helped. For the first time ever I let her do more than just grease the tin (when we were younger this control-freakish tendency was the cause of numerous tearful arguments). The result tasted really good, thanks to the trove of roasted pistachios and almonds in the biscuits, but was deemed by the family to be a little hard on the old pearly whites... Michele (my Italian cousin who's staying with us at the moment) came to the rescue with a bottle of muscat for dunking. Lateral thinking at it's best!

The hardness was probably due to the over-long cooking time and using superfine flour, which gave the dough too close a texture. Second time round, I adjusted the time and used ordinary baking flour, and they came out pretty well. Only hazelnuts were to be found, but in fact I think I like them as much as almonds in my biscuits. And after roasting the hand-skinning process was rather therapeutic, fingers getting covered in the rich-scented hazelnut oil...


The texture was much better, coarser, and not as hard. Though when I checked out the Italian wiki entry, the illustration showed them to be much richer in colour than mine... that's something I'll work on next time.