This holiday season is the debut of our new bakery treat, the almond & Meyer lemon biscotti. Those in the know will be able to pick up a bag or two at the Lanikai Craft Fair on December 6th. The sale opens at 9:00 a.m. so get there early.
We used a recipe from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. The recipe calls for almonds and anise and gives the option of using more lemon zest in lieu of the anise.
It made sense to accent the Meyer lemons from our garden. In the end after running a test batch we doubled the amount of lemon zest.
There is more to this recipe selection. While at UC Berkeley with Kathleen, I arranged for Kip Mesirow to teach an upper division class in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design. Kip taught traditional Japanese wood joinery. I later started doing some woodworking for Kip. One of his projects at that time was the Chez Panisse restaurant that was co-founded by Alice Waters.
I made the wood countertop below the book in this photograph using the Stanley 45 wood plane that I purchased when I was working with Kip in 1975. I used the plane to cut the groove for the oak splines that join the native Hawaiian ohia wood boards.
The list of ingredients for the biscotti is quite simple. Almonds, lemon zest, eggs, sugar, flour and baking powder. I learned a new trick from this recipe. Use room temperature eggs. This will cut in half the amount of time and arm fatigue necessary to whisk the eggs enough to create a "ribbon".
We used the Blue Diamond almonds instead of roasting raw almonds. The unsalted Oven Roasted almonds that come in these double sealed jars have a better crunch than almonds from a metal can.
To chop nuts I like to use a mezzaluna knife and chopping block. This way fewer nuts get lost in the process.
This is what the lemon zest looks like after using a Microplane. It is easy to get just the zest off without getting into the white portion of the lemon skin or into the red portion of your own skin!
After baking for about 25 minutes the cooled loaves are cut into 1/2 inch slices and baked again. Based on our test batch we decided to reduce the time for the second bake to only 5 minutes a side.
The biscotti are allowed to cool on a wire rack before packaging. They should stay fresh for about 3 to 4 weeks in a sealed container. We would not know as they do not last that long.
We like to use labels for our products. It helps people know what to expect. Some bake sale items are sold with the comment "It looks good but I am not sure what it is". We use Avery labels created with the free DesignPro 5.4 software also from Avery. They were printed on our Cannon iP4500 inkjet printer.
I put the labels on each Ziploc snack size bag before I inserted two biscotti. These will be a deal for the price they are sold at the Lanikai Association Craft Fair.
Finally we recycled a plastic container from the cheesecake we had for Thanksgiving to package the biscotti for sale at the fair. To dress things up a bit we used ti leaves from our garden to line the container. We hope those who are at the right place at the right time will enjoy our new holiday treat.
