Double Chocolate Cranberry Biscotti

I love biscotti because it is a dessert that can be considered a legitimate breakfast food--not that I let popular opinion keep me from eating left over apple pie at 7 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving.  Favorite breakfast of the year. In the long months 'til then though I will gladly settle for these. 

The base recipe I use is from Martha Stewart and you can find that here. If you search on the Martha Stewart web site you will find about 20 recipes for chocolate biscotti, including about 5 just for chocolate pistachio biscotti (someone had too much time on her hands in prison). Speaking of which, I'm sure you've seen this but it still makes me smile.

One of these people is a convicted felon.

Actually they both are. Anytime someone tries to say I'm like Martha Stewart I like to remind them that I've never done time. And as I write this I'm realizing that I've probably blown my chances of this ever happening. Oh well, let's face it that was a long shot anyway. 

I like this particular recipe because it is softer and simpler than many of her other versions. After many batches I have made a few adjustments. First, I never have pistachios on hand so instead I use 1/2 cup of craisins and 1/2 cup chocolate chips.

Second, instead of forming the dough into one large flattened "log" I make two narrower ones. Since the pieces are sliced on the diagonal anyway, they still end up a nice size, and this increases the yield of this recipe. I've also found when I only did one large log the pieces are so big they end up breaking, and the beauty of this cookie is the nice rounded ends and smooth sides I think, so smaller = prettier. Since smaller things bake faster, I also shorten the baking time to about 20 minutes. 

I think Martha's recipe says that this serves 4. Now that's my kind of serving size, because as you can see just one log was about 15 pieces. If you want to stick with that we won't judge. But if you think that you may eat less than 8 pieces in a sitting, you could probably invite a few more friends. From the looks of my last batch you will get about 30 biscotti out of this recipe. A little slicing tip: use a bread knife and only slide one direction, don't saw like you're cutting a loaf of bread or the pieces will break up.

Martha also says to bake them for 8 minutes after slicing them up and putting them back on the baking sheet like so, but I find they are still a little too soft. After 8 minutes at 300º I flip them all over to the other side and bake for another 6 minutes.

Then you have, in my humble opinion, perfect chocolate biscotti. If you want to whip up a batch to take with you to your Chocoholics Anonymous meeting you can go ahead and dip them in melted chocolate chips or chocolate almond bark. If not, sit down with your three favorite friends and enjoy Martha's idea of a serving. : )

And don't forget the coffee or chai. Mmm. So good. Thanks for reading.