Biscotti Disaster

 

I have no idea whatever possessed me to decide to bake biscotti from scratch. One night I was flipping through a magazine and found a recipe for pistachio cranberry biscotti. The picture looked so good and after reading the ingredients and directions I thought, "That doesn't sound too hard." I figured that if I could find the dried cranberries and the shelled pistachios in the grocery store, with very little effort, then I would give it a go. Of course, I truly thought I would have trouble locating the items and therefore would give up on the idea quickly and NOT have to actually do the baking. But to my surprise I found the darn ingredients with no trouble.

So off I went on my baking adventure. And an adventure it was.

The first thing I had to do was beat, blend, or mix . . . I'm not quite sure what the difference is between those terms, and as Penni pointed out, that may be my first problem. But non-the-less, I threw the sugar, baking powder, and whatever other dry ingredients into my mixing bowl along with the 2 eggs the recipe called for. I turned on my trusty little electric mixer and all the ingredients proceeded to bunch up into one huge ball of mess, wrapped around the mixer do-hickies. Now what? How the heck will I get it off? Uuuuugh. I tried the trick of slowly lifting the beater up and managed to get most of the sticky mess off the beater things without having too much fly around the kitchen.

Now I'm left with a big slop of super sticky, not quite mixed dough and another pile of dry ingredients that I can't get to mix into the wet slop. Did I mention that I only really have one hand to work with (my left one no less) due to the stupid sores on my right hand?

 

So I try like crazy to mix this cement with my left hand, but it just doesn't work. I'm forced to break the recipe (God forbid I don't go by the book) and crack another egg in to give it more stick.

By (left) hand, I manage to get all the ingredients wet and sticky and then I threw in the nuts and berries. OK, maybe I'm back on track. Next step was to transfer the sticky mess to a "prepared work surface" and form into two logs. Unsure of what I was supposed to do to 'prepare' my work surface because NOTHING could have prepared me for what I was about to face. I threw some flour all over my immaculately clean counter (and that hurt, let me tell you). I tried to grab the sticky mess with my one good hand and that quickly went nowhere. I was forced to use my preciously tender and un-bandaged right hand and now I was stuck. The slop was impossible to move or work with. I ended up with literally half of it stuck to me with no idea how to get it off of my hands. I wanted to cry.

Two logs? The recipe HAD to be kidding. I tried to just grab everything off the counter and put it onto the freezer paper-lined cookie sheet. What the point was of first putting the slop on the counter just baffles me. I'm not even sure how I managed to get any of the stupid slop from the counter and onto the cookie sheet, but I did it. It wasn't pretty, but I did it.

I would say at least 25% of the batter was still stuck to my hands and you should have seen me trying to get if off my poor painful right hand. What an ordeal that was. Then I had to turn around and figure out how to remove the cement from the counter.

At this point I figured I had to just give it a go and bake the darn thing. I got this far and no matter how bad they came out, I was eating them. Dammit! So in the oven they went . . .

They came out not so bad. The recipe said it would yield 30 cookies and I only got 10, but that was understandable considering how much batter went down the drain. To remedy the problem I cut them all in half.

And after all that work, nobody tried a single one on Christmas day. I weeped.

The next day Karlo decided to try one out. He asked if "they were meant to be dunked into coffee" and I said yes, but mine weren't like real biscotti and they weren't that hard and crunchy. So he proceeded to DUNK ONE INTO HIS COKE. I threw my arms up in complete disgust. Who dunks biscotti into Coke???? What a waste of all my effort. NEVER again. I got up and pitched the recipe into the wood stove. There will be no further urges in the future.