Simple baking projects, like making homemade biscotti, are my favorites.  This week  I made two cakes that sounded good in print but didn’t turn out – maybe they contained too much fruit layered into the raw batter or were under baked (?) but they both had terrible sort of mushy textures.  The first cake was a banana rum raisin and the second one was a rose flavored raspberry filled loaf cake.  I guess the tip off should have been there were no photographs of either cake in the cookbooks I used and being slightly suspicious I do wonder why some recipes don’t have pictures!?

My tender biscotti filled with toasted hazelnuts and flavored with three kinds of vanilla are  all around good eating cookies that don’t need to be softened up by dunking.   I’m also sharing a few pictures-always a good sign of baking success.

They would also be good served with espresso but mainly I like to keep them in a container in my kitchen to help myself when the cravings for vanilla hazelnut biscotti hit which for me could be just about at any moment.

I gave these fairly thick sliced biscotti a good sprinkling of lavender vanilla sugar.  The best way to evenly slice biscotti  is to slice straight down through the cooled baked log with a serrated knife.  I like to toast one side and then flip to toast the other side until they are a light golden brown in color.  Make sure to lower the heat of the oven before toasting your biscotti.

It’s easy to get into biscotti baking and fun to collect favorite recipes.  They also make great gifts, especially for shipping around the holidays.  I shipped a box of my Nutella biscotti for Valentine’s Day to  Athens and they arrived weeks later still fresh.  I didn’t realize how long the package would take to arrive when I shipped them but thankfully I made and sent biscotti which are a very forgiving traveling cookie.  A good eating, dunking and traveling cookie- I like having biscotti in my cookie jar.