A New Venture - Wholewheat Nut and Seed Biscotti

I am a great fan of Heidi Swanson - her website 101 cookbooks (link in My Favourite Bloggers) is filled with healthy, easy and quick recipes. Most of them are vegetarian, which is good for me. She uses less butter/oil, wholegrains, lower fat ingredients but still turns out yummy, mouthwatering dishes.

I have never baked biscotti before. I have been having this in my mind since many days and was researching on healthy recipes for baking biscotti. I had a couple bookmarked but this one at Heidi's website was very tempting as it uses NO BUTTER at all. We had a relaxing day and in the evening I just thought I will bake something while my baby was enjoying his dad-time.

I followed her recipe but did some minor tweaks. Her recipe calls for a pinch of salt which I didnt put as I wasn't sure how that would taste. Also I mixed 1/4 cup olive oil in the batter.

Ingredients

Wholewheat flour - 1 1/2 cup
Mixed nuts and seeds - I used Pistachios, Pecans, Sunflower Seeds, Pumpkin Seeds and Sesame seeds
Muscavado Sugar - 1/2 cup
Extra virgin Olive oil - 1/4 cup
Eggs - 2

Method

Preheat the oven to 150 degC.
In a dry pan roast the nuts and seeds until you get a nice aroma - make sure you add sesame seed at the very end. Once they are a bit cool, chop them roughly.
In a mixing bowl, whisk eggs, sugar and olive oil. Reserve a couple tsp of olive oil for later.
Mix the chopped nuts with the wheatflour first.
Add the whole dry mixture into the wet mixture and mix.
The dough will be very tight. Pack it into a greased bread loaf pan tightly.
Bake until the loaf is cooked. Mine took about 30 minutes.
Take the loaf out of the oven and turn the heat on to 200 degC.
Run a knife along the edges of the loaf to release it and turn it out onto a clean chopping board.
Using a serrated knife slice the loaf into 1/4 inch pieces. The thinner the better.
Arrange them onto the baking sheet, spray/brush with some olive oil and bake it again for 5 minutes.
Flip the biscottis, apply some olive oil on the other side and bake for 5 minutes.

These crispy and crunchy biscottis tasted so good especially dunk in some good hot coffee. A nice and healthy snack...

I will try out the other biscotti recipes also soon. But for now... I am very pleased about my very first biscotti baking experience.