Growing Up - take a chance on me...

Yes, part of it does remind you of  the ABBA song! But my post is all about me growing up and maturing as a food blogger and being ready to take a chance on preparing and baking different kind of foods. Earlier I wanted to stay within my comfort zone and was terrified of trying out a new recipe but I actually stumped myself today.

I baked some Biscotti that I wasn't sure would come out too well ( so it is with cheesecake baked in water baths, puff pastry from scratch, galletes and numerous other things which you are going to see posted on my blog from now on..) but I had to go ahead and give it a try. And I changed the recipe all together. This was for two reasons - firstly, I wanted it to be something that my toddler would enjoy and secondly, I wanted to make it a bit healthy. Anyways, Biscotti are supposed to be a nice hard double baked biscuits but I didn't overbake mine so that the son can enjoy them! Though these biscuits are not overloaded with butter and sugar I still tried to make a healthy variant of the original recipe since I was out of all purpose flour.

So here is the original recipe - adapted from a scrap of paper which is part of my recipe collection - I wish I could remember which website I got it off - with my substitutions mentioned on the right.

31/2 cup flour - I used half all purpose flour and half cup millet flour (nachni aata - this has a very earthen chocolaty taste to once roasted)
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
11/2 cup sugar (I used a mix of brown and regular)
1/2 cup butter
1 cup chocolate chips or nuts ( I omitted this as it was a trial recipe)
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla essence

I cream the butter and sugar together with my electric mixer. Then added the eggs and vanilla essence. I mixed all the dry ingredients and changed the attachments for my mixer to the dough mixer. I mixed the flour a little at the time and then oiled my hands and used a floured surface to knead the dough since it was very sticky.

I divided the dough into two and made two loaves which were slightly raised in the middle and left at least 4-5 inches of space between the two since they expand quite a bit.

I bake these loaves for 25 minutes at 165C. The only problem I faced was that my dough after 25 minutes was a little crumbly on the top and even tough I used a serrated knife to cut it - a couple of pieces broke into two.

One cut into individual cookies, I baked them for 10 minutes on each side at 150C. The aroma that wafted through my kitchen had my son singing "mama chok-it (coz he cant say chocolate)". And they were worth the effort and time.

I will definitely substitute in the nuts next time.