111 Biscotti

Let me es-plain...no, there is too much. Let me sum up: we visited Provence for two lovely weeks, returned home only to discover a plumbing/plaster disaster, were displaced for nearly two weeks, both got sick with sinusy stuff, and though we were able to move back into our apartment on the 13th, are STILL dealing with various problems created by Count Rugen and Crew i.e. the evil plumbers. (Don't tell me you're not getting the Princess Bride references...)

Anyway, after a Saturday spent packing, moving, unpacking, and cleaning (well, and a lovely party that evening at my friend Marta's house, so it was not all bad) we decided to have a rather chill Sunday. We visited the Flagey market to get The Waffle and pick up the last few ingredients I needed for my Sunday afternoon baking project: Biscotti.

Troy's birthday is June 15th, and fell on a Monday this year--a day on which he had French class as well as work. Here in Brussels (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe too) the tradition is for the birthday person to bring in treats to share at the office. Troy decided to take it one step further by bringing them to his French school as well. To cover that many people, we decided that I would whip up a double-batch of what has become my signature cookie: Citrus Almond Biscotti.

I am not a huge baker, but started baking biscotti a few years ago when I returned to Colorado after the summer I lived in Italy. They are not technically difficult to make, but are rather time-consuming, largely due to all the slicing, baking, turning, and re-baking required. (A biscotti trivia: the name is actually derived from the baking method. It loosely translates as "twice cooked".)

I started out with this:



And spent the afternoon and evening transforming it into this:



Troy had fun sharing the cookies with his colleagues and classmates, many of whom were surprisingly unfamiliar with biscotti. According to Troy, they were a big hit!

For his actual birthday, Troy requested a home-cooked meal since we had spent the better part of the last month eating out. He had asked for Mexican food, but said he didn't much care as long as I was making it. Somewhere in the midst of list-making and menu-planning, I decided to add a little bit of trickery to the evening (you've got to keep things interesting somehow). So, I called him at work and asked if he would mind a menu change, spouting off a set of complicated Italian dishes to back up my ruse. In the two hours I had between when he came home from work and returned again from French class, I managed to make the real meal, a Spanish-Mexican fusion of guacamole and chips, spicy white beans, chicken fajitas with all the fixins' and sangria.



Troy was totally tricked and the meal was delicious, a winning combination in my book. Given the craziness of the preceding few weeks, I did not have time to bake a cake like last year. So, instead we settled for scoops of vanilla bean ice cream topped with the drunken sangria fruit and crumbled biscotti. I even found a little candle to make it festive. All and all, it turned out to be a bon anniversaire.