Cantuccini and Biscotti for Mother's Day

This year, my sister and I couldn't visit our parents for Mother's Day, so we sent our Mum baked italian cookies via mail: Biscotti alle Nocciole, cookies with hazelnuts, and toscan almond cookies, the famous Cantuccini.

The Biscotti are stable enough to survive the transport and our Mum was very happy! :-)

Ingredients for 60 Biscotti alle Nocciole:

160 g dark chocolate

280 g flour

30 g cocoa

1 TSP baking soda

1 TSP salt

85 g butter

210 g sugar 

2 eggs

150 g hazelnuts

Energy: 75 kcal per Biscotto 

Preparation Biscotti:

Heat the oven to 180° C and line a baking rack with baking paper. Chop the chocolate. Knead a dough out of the ingredients except for the nuts, knead the nuts into the finished dough.

Cut the dough in 4 equal parts and form them to ropes of about 35 cm in length. Lay the ropes on the prepared baking rack and bake them for 35 min, it's okay for little cracks to form on the upperside. Take the rack out of the oven and let the loaves cool on the rack for about 10 min. Cut the loaves into slices on a cutting board using a sharp knife.  

Lay the slices back on the baking rack and bake the biscotto for an additional 10 min. Let them cool and keep them in a cookie tin or mail them to someone who has earned them...

Ingedients for 60 Cantuccini:

200 g almonds

250 g flour

140 g sugar 

1 TSP baking powder

2 P. vanilla suger

1 pinch salt

25 g butter 

2  eggs

Energy: 51 kcal per Cantuccino

Preparation Cantuccini:

You can browse the almonds with boiling water and remove their skins if you want, we didn't this time as I think the slight dark rim looks nice and tastes more intense. Set your oven to 200°C.

Knead the rest of the ingredients into a smooth dough. Proceed to knead in the almonds and divide the dough in 4 parts, form each part into a rope of about 35 cm length.
Line a baking rack with baking paper and place the ropes on the paper.

Bake the loaves for 15 minutes in the pre-heated oven at 200°C, let them cool for a bit and cut them into slanted slices. Lay the slices on the rack and bake them for another 10 minutes until golden brown.

Let both kinds of cookies cool and keep them in a cookie tin, such that they will stay crunchy. A cookie tin also serves nicely as wrapping if you want to mail the cookies - just use a piece of baking paper to stack the cookies, neatly divided by color, into the tin, then remove the paper. Cushion the cookies with some tinfoil paper against the lid of the tin, wrap the tin, and off they go - Happy Mother's Day!