Good Grief! This is Some Great Pumpkin Biscotti
It’s that time of year, and whether you have carved your own pumpkin or just found a good deal on canned pumpkin puree, you might be looking for some recipes in which to use this tasty gourd. I make biscotti fairly often, so when I came across this recipe for pumpkin biscotti, I thought it would be cool to try it. The photo on Pinterest looks like this:
Photo courtesy of mybakingaddiction.com
INGREDIENTS:
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla paste (1 tablespoon vanilla extract will work fine)
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
1 1/4 cup nuts, coarsely chopped (I used pecans)
DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Combine flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and pumpkin pie spice in a large bowl; stir well. In another bowl, combine pumpkin, eggs, and vanilla, stirring well with a wire whisk. Slowly add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture, stirring until dry ingredients are moistened. (Mixture will be very crumbly; it will gradually become moist after stirring.)
3. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat; add nuts. Cook, stirring constantly, until nuts are browned. Remove from heat and cool completely.
4. Knead or gently stir cooled nuts into dough. Place dough on a lightly floured surface and divide into 2 portions. Lightly flour hands and shape each portion into a 2 x 10″ long log. Place logs 3″ apart on lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake for 24 minutes; cool logs 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 300 F.
5. After some cooling, move a loaf to a cutting board and cut diagonally into 1/2″ thick pieces. Do the same to the other loaf. The interior of each biscotto should still be just a little moist (while the exterior is nice and hard). The crust of the loaf will probably be quite hard, so use a large serrated knife such as a bread knife for this job.
6. Place the biscotti with a cut side facing up on a half sheet pan and bake for 8 minutes. Remove the pan and flip all the biscotti over so the other cut side is now facing up. Bake for another 7 minutes. Set all the pieces on a wire rack to cool making sure that none of the biscotti are touching each other. If the biscotti are placed too close together, they could get a little soft or soggy as they cool.
7. Once the biscotti have fully cooled, they can be consumed as is, or white chocolate dipped. I opted for a simple white chocolate drizzle. I just melted some white chocolate chips, placed the melted chocolate in a zip top bag, cut a small opening in one corner and drizzled it across the biscotti.
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I did not use the nuts in my biscotti, so I didn’t need to use the butter or margarine either.
First I mixed all of the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
Then, I mixed the pumpkin, egg, and vanilla together with a mixer.
I don’t have a dough hook for my mixer, but if you have one, you might want to use it when you incorporate the dry ingredients, because the dough gets quite thick. (When I make plain biscotti, I actually mix the dough in my bread maker. I wasn’t sure how that would work out with the pumpkin, but it probably would be fine.)
Next, I took handfuls of dough and rolled each into a ball
before rolling out a long tube.
The tube was then flattened a bit and rounded on the edges.
I baked two loaves at a time at 350 for 20 minutes, and they were perfectly done.
Once they had cooled for 15 minutes, they were cut into half-inch slices.
And then I baked those for 5 minutes on each side at 300 degrees.
I didn’t want to used white chocolate for the icing, so I used a poured sugar icing.
Recipe:
3 TBS milk
1 TSP Vanilla extract
2 cups (give or take) of confectioner’s sugar
Whisked together until thick but pourable.
Then I drizzled the icing over the biscotti and let it set.
Yum!! It goes great with a cup of tea. (Roaring fire optional.)
