Biscotti: Pasta Frolla and the Rest of the Story

I think I mentioned earlier that when I was hunting down an alternative 'biscotti' recipe I found out that 'biscotti' did not mean the same thing that it does in the English speaking world.

Anyway, this is one of the 'biscotti recipes my friend Valeria Bandini gave me. It's called Pasta Frolla. Basically even though 'biscotti' means twice baked/cooked - these days it's a generic term for any kind of 'cookie' or 'biscuit' and includes things that aren't baked twice.

I had this recipe lying around for some time and didn't have a chance to make it, but yesterday Ronny's mom and partner called and told us they were coming for a visit so I whipped this up really quickly!

The resulting cookies were buttery, light, crusty and quite delicious with confectioner's sugar sprinkled over them.

Ingredients

250g Flour

125 g Butter

110 g Refined White Sugar

1 Egg

1 Egg Yolk

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 180C. Make sure the butter is soft and mix it in with the flour to make a flaky dough and then mix in the rest of the ingredients. Just be careful to knead the dough as little as possible only doing this enough so that it all sticks together. Keep in mind the same things you would when making a pie crust. If you over knead the dough, the cookies will not be light and crusty so this is important.

Step 2: Roll out the 'pasta' or dough and cut into desired shapes.

Step 3: Bake in the oven until the light colored dough has a golden hue. This will be between 10 - 15 minutes depending on your oven.

Note 1: I noticed that because I didn't roll out the dough evenly enough some browned faster than the others - so I had to take them out of the oven while the paler ones were left in there to get a better tan.

Note 2: I'm a food blogger and I don't even have a cookie cutter so I used a glass that used to contain lemon sorbet with limoncello. It's not that I've never owned any cookie cutters but they all got lost when I moved countries. I didn't realize cookie cutters would be so difficult to find in this area of the world.