The only biscotti recipe you’ll ever need — and a breakfast version worth waking up for

If you’ve been following along with me here, you may already be familiar with the fact I have a distinct penchant for a biscuit. The crunch, the durability, the eating with fingers not forks, all of it. And how could we ever talk about biscuits without discussing the master of them all? The OG: The biscotti. Roman in origin? Maybe. Twice baked, designed for long journeys. Latterly made with almonds and sweetened and utterly perfect with coffee. (Dunked, obviously.) We bake them first as a loaf, then slice them and bake them again. This double-handling may seem like a fuss until you dunk a homemade biscotti into a morning espresso, or afternoon tea, or evening hot chocolate. Traditionally biscotti is made with just almonds but over here we’ve added everything from orange zest and dark chocolate to cranberries and macadamias, dried figs and walnuts, and more recently a “breakfast” version of oats and dried cherries (please see following.)

My biscotti recipe came to me originally from my sister Naomi, who got it from her friend Harriet, and it sat in my recipe file for 20 years with the title ‘Harriet’s Biscotti’. I’m still not sure who Harriet is, but I’m very grateful to her. We made these in commercial volumes for a few years at the farm, and I love them for their longevity and hardiness, versatility and variation and how good they are dunked in coffee.

Biscotti

Makes approx. 30

Ingredients

375 g (2 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
230 g (1 cup) caster (superfine) sugar (caster is ideal but white is fine)
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
80 g (½ cup) almonds, chopped (optional)

Method

Preheat your oven to 160°C (320°F) (150°C/300°F fan-forced).

In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the eggs and vanilla until a dough forms (sometimes I add a tiny bit of water if the mix is particularly dry). Add the almonds and mix well.

Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead several times. Halve the dough and then shape each half into a slightly flattened log. Place the logs on a greased or lined baking tray. Bake in the middle of the oven until golden, about 25–30 minutes. Leave the oven on.

Take out and cool for 10 minutes, then cut each log diagonally into slices and return the slices, in a single layer, to the baking sheet. Bake again, turning once, for about 10 minutes each side – just be careful as they can start to overcook very quickly.

Breakfast Biscotti

My eldest kid, still at home, hasn’t had much appetite lately. I’ll do anything for him, and that includes feeding him biscuits at breakfast if that’s what we need to do! He has one coffee a day, which he loves, and so I invented ‘Breakfast Biscotti’ which he appreciates and I get all the feelings watching him quietly dunk biscotti into coffee, and I wonder where the world will take him and whether he’ll dunk biscuits into coffee in Italy one day and think of our breakfast table and his chattering sister, his mother flapping around and his father coming in from morning farm chores and turning on our precious coffee machine saying, “Wait, there’s BISCOTTI?!”

Makes approx. 30

Ingredients

375 g (2 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour, plus extra for dusting
230 g (1 cup) caster (superfine) sugar (caster is ideal, but white is fine)
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125 ml (1/2 cup) milk
60 g (1/3 cup) dried cherries (or cranberries)
40 g (1/3 cup) rolled oats

Method

Preheat your oven to 160°C (320°F) (150°C/300°F fan-forced).

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl or jug, mix the eggs, vanilla and milk together. Add this to the dry mix and stir well until a dough forms. Add the cherries and oats and mix well.

Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead several times. Halve the dough and then shape each half into a slightly flattened log. Place the logs onto a greased or lined baking tray. Bake in the middle of the oven until golden, about 25–30 minutes. Leave the oven on.

Take out and cool for 10 minutes, then cut each log diagonally into slices and return the slices, in a single layer, to the baking tray. Bake again, turning once, for about 10 minutes each side – just be careful as they can start to overcook very quickly.

They store well in an airtight container for at least 5 weeks.

Note

Other good ‘breakfast’ biscotti combinations include almonds and oats; pistachios and orange zest; walnut, cinnamon and hazelnut; white chocolate and cranberry.

Recipe adapted from Fiona’s book “From Scratch” published by Hardie Grant 2022, photography by Alan Benson