Recipe Result: Mosaic (Deep Breath) Biscotti

I am continuing to slowly bake my way through the cookbook Dolce Italiano by Gina DePalma, Mario Batali's pastry chef.  I got a little hung up on the Lemony Semolina Cookies for a while, as I do with most anything that a) has the word "lemony" in it, b) uses zest and c) is a cookie, but I broke free of that citrus-induced trance and moved along to a new recipe.

And...(ominous old timey soap opera dun-dun-dun musical cue)...back to biscotti.

My ongoing biscotti failure has been previously documented here, so I'm not going to open up old wounds, except to open up the most painful old biscotti wound which is to say: it wasn't always like this.  I used to be able to make perfectly serviceable, not-shame-inducing biscotti.

Whither my biscotti mojo?  Why have you forsaken me?  I feel like it's only been since I moved to Seattle, so I am going to blame the Pacific Northwest (shakes fist around at general surroundings).

But every once in a while I feel compelled to try try again.  Since I had a random surplus of hazelnuts, I decided to try the recipe for Mosaic Biscotti (link is to a modified version that halves the original quantities - not a bad idea; it makes a lot).

The recipe is called "Mosaic" Biscotti because of the pattern made by the nuts and chocolate.  The biscotti in the picture in the recipe link is more mosaic-like than mine turned out to be as I opted to not use the pistachios, and just make it with hazelnuts. I only used, though, the 2 cups of hazelnuts originally called for (i.e., did not replace the 2 cups of pistachios with an additional 2 cups of hazelnuts) and I am amazed that the recipe would work with twice as many nuts as the cookies seemed pretty chock-full as they were.

As to the taste...I mean, they weren't bad.  Okay, so they were good enough that though I truly intended to send to my grandmother the ones I didn't give away to the local folks, I sort of accidentally ate them all myself for breakfast over the next few days.

But then again, they had a nice Guittard semi-sweet chocolate and some of the freakishly excellent hazelnuts from Holmquist, and so when you have so much of the cookie being two solidly delicious ingredients, it's hard for it to fail, really.

Ergo: I am still not satisfied. I feel like the texture and color was off (too soft despite what seemed to be adequate baking time).  I am starting to think that my oven is the problem, but what the actual problem is seems to require some sort of tedious common sense that I am blissfully free from.  

I will have to figure it out, as I now clearly owe my grandmother some biscotti and there are some birthdays coming up and biscotti's longer shelf life makes it a good cookie for gifts.

So this isn't over, biscotti.  You haven't beaten me. You can continue to disappoint me but I am going to bake you into submission at some point, just you wait.