PRODUCT REVIEW: COCOA GARDEN HOMEMADE CHOCOLATES

For all the joy of homemade chocolate with none of the effort

 

Any true connoisseur will agree nothing beats homemade. This winter skip the mass manufactured candy and order an assorted batch from Cocoa Garden, each chocolate is hand made and packaged in small batches. I inhaled my box within a day of receiving it. The dark chocolate and butterscotch were so good they vanished within the first couple of hours of receipt of possession.

Reach them at their facebook page here (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cocoa-Garden/)

PRODUCT REVIEW: HOKEY POKEY ICE CREAM

For troubled times

 

There are days that can only be survived with the aid of your most comfortable {and most tattered} pyjamas and a tub of ice cream. My preference is usually mango or in particularly dire circumstances, double chocolate. Nature’s Basket and Modern Bazaar are now stocking gloriously creamy tubs of Hokey Pokey for exactly those kinds of days. India’s answer to Ben & Jerry’s, Hokey Pokey’s quirky, yet delicious, flavour blends include Live and Laugh Brownie {Fresh Cream Ice Cream with Crumbled Brownies, Roasted Cashews and Dark Chocolate Fudge} and my current favourite, Manic Monkey {Chocolate Ice Cream with Almonds, Crunchy Praline and White Chocolate Fudge}. The adorable packaging and unabashedly rich ingredient layering all recommend Hokey Pokey over its more mundane, plain vanilla competitors {I can’t wait to try Cherry Chipchunks and the Black Forest Blend} but what really caught my eye was that the products contain no added flavours or preservatives.

 

A walk down HKV revealed that they’re opening up a full fledged ice cream parlour where you can realize all your ice cream fantasies but till then we’ll have to make do with their pint tubs!

 

Dig into a tub of Hokey Pokey and you’ll find the texture is palpably creamier than most Indian brands, and you don’t have to feel guilty about having bought a product with a larger carbon footprint than you. No added colouring and preservatives mean there’s less chemical gunk floating around in your system at the end of the tub. Crazy flavour combinations mean you’ll never get bored.

 

Available at Godrej Nature’s Basket  and Modern Bazaar stores across town.

Find more on their Facebook page, here.

Photos courtesy Hokey Pokey

BANANA STRAWBERRY CHOCOLATE BITES

“Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

 

 

My mother recently pointed out that she'd had two kids by my age. While I don't have any plans to push any out in the near future, this lovely list of lessons from a mother to a daughter (read it here) inspired me to put together my own list of lessons learnt for any future female progeny.
 
1. If you can't figure out why someone is doing what they are - look at what they've done in the past.

2. Learn to play a team sport.

3. Wear nice shoes and take care of your feet.

4. You don't have to be a great cook but you need to be able to: (a) fend for yourself in the kitchen if there's not takeout available, (b) feed the ones you love once in a while, and (c) have a signature dish that you do amazingly well.

5. If you can help, do it.

6. Sunscreen is for everyone.

7. If s/he is telling you someone else's secrets then be sure they'll tell yours to someone else.

8. Marriage is not the solution. You are.

9. Find a shade of lipstick that works for you and wear it when in doubt.

10. Travel. A lot. Often.

11. Carbohydrates, gluten, men, women and/or math are not the enemy.

12. If you take their money they'll take your freedom.

13. Don't stop dreaming but nobody promised you a rose garden.

14. Make mistakes, everyone does. Just be honest about them.

15. There's nothing wrong with liking nice things but try to save atleast a little of your salary every month.

16. If he left someone for you, he will leave you for someone else.

17. There are some things we do for money and some things we do for love - know which is which and that both are valuable.

18. You should be able to wear/say/do what you want but the world is unfair. Make the most of what you've got. You're better off than most.

19. Value old things. Half your story is where you came from.

20. Pick your addictions, friends and fights well.

21. Cleanse, exfoliate, condition, moisturize. That's pretty much all of it. Don't let beauty magazines tell you there's more.

22. Don't change for a man and don't expect a man to change for you.

23. You need to be able to pay for your existence by 24.

24. Massages, bath products, great food, books and live performances are always worth it.

25. Diet pills, fairness products and cheap shoes are not.

26. Don't believe everything you read.   

27. Don't believe everything you hear.

28. Don't believe everything you see.

29. You don't have to pick a signature scent.

30. Hydrate.

31. Call me if you're in trouble. Any trouble.

32. Worry about the environment.

33. You have every right to pick your job, husband, religion, politics and wardrobe. Just remember all choices come with consequences.

34. Move abroad, if you like, it's probably a better life but I'd like if you made a difference here.

35. Don't worry about making people angry.

36. Life is only ever going to get busier. Learn to make lists.  

37. Hobbies are necessary.

38. Vote.

39. Sometimes the smartest thing to do is get out.

40. When you feel overwhelmed, walk away, drink a glass of water and wash your face.

41. Your surroundings reflect who you are and who you want to be.

42. Keep a journal.

43. The curative properties of a hot bath are greater than those of alcohol.

44. If you have an option, choose handmade.

45. Do not sideline your friends for a relationship. This has never worked out for anyone.

46. Know the difference between how you look in crepe, chiffon, georgette and silk.

47. You don't have to get along with your gossipy aunt, busybody cousin or chauvinistic uncle but you have to be polite to them.

48. Mentor someone.

49. Donate. Many in our country have very little.

50. There is a middle ground between what your heart says and what your mother says. Look for it.

51. Be kind to those who work for you, children and animals.

52. Learn how to tie a sari.

53. Your boss will lie to you. It's part of the job description.

54. Everyone needs a good dentist, tailor, gynecologist, dry cleaner, financial advisor, dermatologist and mentor.

55. Firsts are overrated. This first love/job/apartment drama is a scam - some people only get it right in their 35th try and there's nothing wrong with that.  

56. "This is how things have always been," "this is not our culture," "what will people say," are not valid arguments.
 
57. Don't put up with anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself.

58. This too shall pass.

59. Be ambitious.

60. Call your friends home often.

 

About 15 – 20 bites

Recipe adapted from Oh She Glows

 

What you’ll need:

3-4 bananas

Handful of strawberries
½ cup of chocolate (melted)
¼ cup of chopped almonds/ walnuts/ shredded coconut (whatever you have on hand)

How to:

1. Chop up the bananas and strawberries into the same number of pieces and make little skewers of strawberries and bananas.

2. Put together an assembly line to avoid getting melted chocolate and nuts all over the place with the bowl of chocolate first and then the bowl of chopped nuts.

3. Dip the skewer first in the chocolate and then quickly coat the melted chocolate with the nuts/coconut. 

 

4. Sit the skewers in cupcake liners and stick them in the fridge for a minimum of 15 minutes.

 

 

PRODUCT REVIEW: DIVIN-E-LICIOUS CUPCAKES

I'm a huge fan of the good work being done by the lovely sisters behind Divin-e-licious, Gayatri and Anushka Kakkar. They're an embodiment of my favorite modern fairy tale, both sisters fought off the siren song of filthy lucre to pursue their gourmand dreams and made a huge success of it. The princesses then lived happily ever after pursuing a lifetime of successful entrepreneurship.

 I'm not the biggest cupcake fan so I was really excited to hear they had decided to push the baking envelope and expand their menu to include a variety of mini jar cakes. Each eggless cake is baked into a little jar dripping in pearls and packed into a gorgeous floral box just in time for the festive season.

I tore through the classic chocolate, licked the jar of chocolate ganache clean and wept with joy over the red velvet. My personal favorite though was the chocolate nougat which made me feel like my mouth was surfing through waves of impossibly rich chocolate interspersed with perfect, little bursts of nougat-y crunch.

  

Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/Divin.e.licious.cupcakes

Contact: 9811961572

THE GOOD PEOPLE AT GOONJ AND MEXICAN MOCHA CRINKLE COOKIES

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank

 

I think we all want to do good. I believe most people would like to leave the world a better place than they found it. Sometimes this life we're trying to better gets in the way of our efforts at improvement. Our good intentions can get buried under smaller but more numerous daily distractions. Unfortunately the world we live in makes ordering pajamas from a different country easier than helping the one we live in. Thankfully, people like the ones behind Goonj can inspire and remind us to do better.

Instead of throwing out your old stuff check out the Goonj website for the donations they accept and considering passing these things on to the people who need it more. They do excellent work reusing old clothes through their donation and Cloth For Work programs. They're also working to collect relief material for those struck by floods in Assam, Bihar and West Bengal and trying to forge long term strategic relationships between well off urban schools and rural schools. You can read more about their exceptional work at their website (http://goonj.org/).

Whether you just want to donate some things or some money, do reach out to this outstanding organization to see how you can help. One of the easiest but most effective things to do is organize a clothes drive to collect old clothes from our friends and acquaintances - me and my friend have tried this with enormous success.

Remind yourself of how much good we can all do if we put our minds to it and bake yourself these celebratory cookies once you're done. They're lovely, crunchy, sticky, spicy and chocolatey all at the same time and very, very easy to make.

 

Makes about 20 fat cookies

Recipe adapted from A Spicy Perspective

What you’ll need:

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 cup powdered sugar
2 cups flour
1 ¼ granulated sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
2 tbsp instant coffee granules
4 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla essence
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 pinch red chilli powder

How to:

1. Whisk together the cocoa, granulated sugar, coffee, cinnamon, red chilli powder, baking powder and salt. Add the oil and mix together.

2. Add the vanilla and eggs - beating the batter till smooth. Refrigerate for an hour or 2 to firm up the batter.

3. Preheat the oven to about 170°C. Pull out 1 or 1 ½ inch balls of the batter, roll into balls and then roll the balls in a plate of powdered sugar.

Note: This rolling into balls business is not going to be as easy as it seems. This is the problem with most recipes. People just write stuff like “roll into cookies and bake” like it’s simple without telling you that this is going to be a fudgy mess that refuses to hold any kind of shape and destroys your manicure. So the best way to go about it will be to flour your hands lightly, use a spoon to scoop out the quantity you want (a heaping teaspoon is about right) and to use your fingers to scrape the batter off the teaspoon and into the powdered sugar. At this point use the sugar to give you traction and roll the dough into a ball.

4. Plonk on a greased baking tray and bake for 10 mins. Let the cookies cool completely before trying to scrape them off or eat them.

NOW PLAYING: WITCHES OF EAST END WITH DOUBLE CHOCOLATE ESPRESSO COOKIES

 “Most people buy the highest quality television sets, only to watch the lowest quality television shows.
”

― Jarod Kintz

 

Next in my list of shows I'm watching is Witches of East End, a sort of Charmed beta version. I loved Charmed when I was a pre-teen with no friends and an embarrassingly high CGPA in New York. Alyssa Milano's crop tops and wedge heels held more sartorial significance for me than Sarah Jessica Parker ever would.

 

So back to Witches of East End, 2 sisters with little in common (one works in a library, the other at the local dive - yeah they aren't subtle on this show) discover they're actually witches. Their powers have been kept secret by their mother for a very complicated reason I'll let you watch the show to figure out. Unsurprisingly, upon discovering these powers the sisters set about trying to navigate love and life while fulfilling their destiny to be super-duper queen bee witches. A process which costs them a few friends - people die quite regularly on the show but the tone never dips below cappuccino froth. The show would drown in its own clichés if it wasn't for the hot, hilarious (and oft naked) Aunt Wendy who lights up every scene she's in.

 

The women are the usual, as witches on TV go, but their characters are more full and funny than most. Unfortunately the men are mere props for them to cast spells on, around or for. Basically a good old fashioned soap that doesn't take itself too seriously for when you want to swap out your day to day drama for some magical gobbledegook.

 

Will you be entertained? 4/5

Does it make sense? 2/5

Is it full of good looking people? 4/5

Is anyone going to get an Emmy? 1/5

 

Just like Witches of East End, these double chocolate espresso cookies make for a great guilty pleasure. The coffee offers a nice, strong, background for the crunch of the cookie and the puddles of chocolate chunks to play.

Makes more than a dozen big cookies

Recipe adapted from the Naptime Chef

 

What you’ll need:

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup chocolate chips
2 eggs
2 ½ cups flour
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tbsp espresso powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

How to:

1. Preheat oven to 170°C.

2. Throw butter and sugars into a big bowl and whisk till light and fluffy. Add an egg at a time, mixing till you have a smooth batter.

3. Mix together all the dry ingredients in another bowl and whisk nicely so it’s all well combined. Add the dry ingredients to the wet slowly making sure everything is nicely mixed in.

4. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Note: I don’t use chocolate chips because I find them too waxy. This might be because I haven’t found a good brand to use yet. I prefer taking cooking chocolate (try Morde) and chopping it up as small as possible. If you don’t want to chop so much then put the chocolate slab in a bag and beat it with a hammer till it splinters into small enough pieces. This has 3 benefits – 1. You can use up the chocolate sitting in your fridge and don’t need to buy another product because lord knows baking is expensive enough, 2. The random shapes give the cookie a much more grown up and rustic look instead of the preciousness of those silly little chocolate chips, and 3. The uneven chunks melt into puddles of chocolate within the cookie for a much richer taste.

5. Roll into cookies and bake for 10 to 12 mins.

Note: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, rolling these bastards into cookies isn’t as easy as it seems. Stick them in the fridge for a little while to firm the batter up, use a spoon to scoop the batter out and keep your hands floured. With all these precautions you’re still going to end up making a mess but you’ll realize how much harder it would have been without doing all this.

 
6. Let them cool completely before devouring.
 

NOW PLAYING: GRIMM WITH CHEWY OATMEAL AND RAISIN COOKIES

 “The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Remember that article on how if you wanted to do something well you have to do it for atleast 10,000 hours? I even write about it here where I whined about how I didn't know what I should spend my time on. On further reflection, I realize I've probably already spent way more than 10,000 hours watching TV. I suppose master of the idiot box is better than nothing at all.

 

My favorite genre of TV show is the police procedural and I watch an unholy number of these. On a day where I don't have much to do I might be witness to an easy 10 -15 murders. On occasion, if I'm in the mood I can be persuaded to watch comedy, some drama or even supernatural mumbo jumbo (okay so you can see I'm not too fussy). A lot of the great shows out there obviously don't need an introduction from me but I thought I'd write about some of the more oddball shows I've caught.

 

 

Currently playing on my screen is Grimm, a police procedural based on the brothers behind all the fairytales. The premise is that the Grimm brothers were actually hunters of supernatural beings (known as Wesen) and hunky Portland detective Nick Burkhardt is one of the few remaining successors of these "Grimms." Their job is to hunt down Wesen who misbehave and chop off their heads (Nick takes a softer stance on this but there's plenty of head chopping anyway). Turns out our favorite fairytale villains are real, more vicious and apparently all over Portland.

 

While the plot is cute, the adorkable cast of characters really carries the show forward. Monroe, Nick's reformed, gentle giant, Wesen sidekick; the sexy, the delectable Captain Sean Raynard; and the girlfriend Juliette are each very likable. As are the less often seen but also captivating Rosalee, the beautiful apothecary and Adeline, the relentlessly scheming, evil Hexinbeast.

 

Unfortunately, the show is too loyal to the police procedural format with Nick insisting on solving a case per episode at the cost of getting into the meat of all this supernatural crazy that's going on. I have a lot of fun trying to identify which characters relate to which kid's story (got Rumpelstiltskin and the 3 Little Pigs so far) and it's comforting because you know Nick is always going to triumph over whatever fanged beast comes hurtling his way.

 

Will you be entertained? 3.5/5

Does it make sense? 3/5

Is it full of good looking people? 3.5/5
Any chance anyone will get an Emmy? 2/5

 

My favorite!

Much, much better for your mind and body are these oatmeal and raisin cookies. This is my first stab at making these and I quite liked how they turned out, chewy and chockfull of sweet, golden raisins.

 

Note: Stick the batter in the fridge for a little while to freeze up the butter and make it easier to scoop on to your baking tray or you'll just end up with mush all over your hands.

Makes about a dozen cookies

Recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen

 

What you’ll need:

½ cup butter

2/3 cup light brown sugar
2 eggs
½ tsp vanilla extract
¾ cup flour
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
1 ½ cups rolled oats
¾ cup raisins

How to:

1. Throw the sugar and butter into a large bowl and mix well till light and frothy. Add egg and vanilla – mix some more.

2. Preheat the oven to 170°C. Mix together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Whisk into the butter batter. Stir in the oats and raisins.

3. Chill the dough for a bit in the fridge to firm it up, scoop it out with a spoon and plunk on to a greased baking tray, leaving some space between them because they’re going to swell.

Note: Chilling the dough helps make the cookie chewier.

4. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Let cool completely before devouring.
 

 

GOOEY CHOCOLATE FILLED CHOCOLATE COOKIES

“To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.”
― Mark Twain

 

There's nothing more exciting for a writer (even a lowly food blogger) than somebody appreciating your work. Thank you so much to everyone who's ever bothered to call/ write in/ message words of kindness. You have no idea how much motivation it offers to someone who spends most of their time worrying about spoons and spatulas. It's easy to feel stupid or like you're wasting your time while everyone's employed at something more lucrative but every compliment lights the way.

 

To spread the sunshine, here are some food writers I love to follow, who are doing amazing things out there in the big, bad blogosphere:

 

1. Tongue Ticklers: Also run by someone who juggles foodblogging and a day job, this site has incredible vegan recipes with some mindblowing food photography. There are lots of Indian food blogs out there but very few with this level of aesthetic polish.

 

2. Sugar and Charm: An old favourite, I've been following Eden Passante and her beautiful family's adventures in California for over 3 years now. A very pretty, very pleasant, very feminine blog filled with design inspiration, photographs and mouthwatering dessert recipes.

 

3. M Loves M: Mara puts together some really charming outfits, simple recipes along with some great photos on this simple but elegant blog.

 

4. Passionate About Baking: Another Indian blog and this one has some hardcore, over the top desserts! Delightful to look at but a little intimidating to try, a lot of these recipes are on my ambitious to do list.

 

5. Sinfully Spicy: I realize I gravitate towards girly, dessert blogs and since we can't survive on cookies and cobblers alone, I'm going to end with this blog that has some seriously delicious savoury dishes.

 

One thing all these blogs have in common is the superlative food photography, I wish I could intern with one of them to figure out how they do it! These are of course just 5 out of the hundreds of food blogs out there and maybe I can make this into a more regular series where I get you more lovely links.

 

The only problem with the world wide web is that it stretches so far and while I'd like to send each of these talented blog owners a batch of these decadent chocolate cookies with gooey chocolate filling, I can't. I made these for a lunch my parents threw and realized that you never grow out of the desire for a crumbly, chocolaty, overload. Or at least my parent's friends haven't. And I haven't either. These are their own reward.
 

 

Makes about a dozen cookies

Adapted from Good Food magazine

 

What you’ll need:

200g dark chocolate

2 tbsp butter
1 egg
¼ cup sugar
¾ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
About a cup of Nutella

How to:

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C.

2. Melt the chocolate and butter together.

3. Whisk the egg and sugar till light and fluffy.

4. Stir the flour and baking powder together. Sieve it in batches into the egg mixture. Chill the dough for 30 minutes to firm it up.

5. Now for the tough part, make 2 inch balls out of the batter and roll it into a fat little circle. Spoon the Nutella into the centre and fold it up like a gujiya. Try to ball the batter into a little bit of a circle so that it bakes into a cookie shape.

Note: As you know, as I repeatedly say, there’s no great value in making food very pretty. It’s best to focus on making it delicious. This cookie is going to be a gorgeous, deep chocolate beauty and nobody is going to judge you if it’s not a perfect circle.

Try to work the Nutella in the best you can, the more you can fit in, the better the cookie will be. Don’t worry about getting the shape perfect. I started out trying to make a dimsum sort of shape but I wasn’t able to work that one out so I picked this half moon instead. Eventually I’d manipulate the half moon into a sort of circle but you can see the cookies aren’t perfectly round even in the end.

6. Seal your little chocolate dimsums and refrigerate them again for about 10 – 20 minutes.

7. Plonk the cookies on a greased baking tray and bake for 10 minutes.

8. Let cool completely before devouring.

  

 

VANILLA CAKE WITH TEA AND VANILLA INFUSED CARAMEL SAUCE

"Good food and a warm kitchen are what makes a house a home." - Rachael Ray

 

 

 This article (Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed)and its hypothesis that our lifestyles are decided for us has been doing the social network rounds. The basic theme is that our 9 to 9 work life makes us vulnerable to stress and monotony which we try to relieve through conspicuous consumption. While I'm broadly on board with the thought process and have often found myself saying something similar, I don't know if I agree as wholeheartedly as I used to.

 

The career corporate lawyer who runs marathons while raising 2 kids, the bureaucrat who writes fiction, the feckless rake who delights in cooking for his younger sister and many, many others I meet or hear of make me believe we need to acknowledge the agency we have in our lives. It's very sensible to recognize the mistakes we're likely to make but I'm not sure I appreciate the finality with which the author makes these doomsday predictions.

 

That ads, models and corporate culture are all peddling their wares is an unfortunate reality but to decide we won't be able to resist is so pessimistic. People are bundles of contradictions, it's one of the few things I actually like about us. There are many out there fighting the good fight, refusing to agree with conventional wisdom or falling prey to its pitfalls. It's easy enough to blame large corporations and their insidious ways but if you know what they're doing, why play along?

 

For everyone who decides they're going to do what is right in the face of a society that expects them to go left and for everyone who agrees that they do indeed have a choice, there is this rebellious little vanilla cake. Sure it's vanilla, but using granulated sugar gives a little crunch to the otherwise plain, buttery body. And to top it off a deeply fragrant, tea and vanilla infused caramel sauce.

 

Bet you didn't expect that.

 

Serves 8

Recipe Adapted From www.sweet-lab.com

What you’ll need:

For the cake:

2 cups flour

1 cup butter
½ cup sugar (granulated)
½ cup light brown sugar
4 eggs + 1 egg yolk
2 tbsp vanilla essence
1 vanilla bean
1 tsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt

For the Black Tea Caramel Sauce:

¾ cup heavy cream

2 black tea bags (I used Earl Grey)
½ cup sugar
2 tbsp water
3 -4 tbsp butter

 

How to:

1. To make the cake, preheat the oven to 180°C, grease a bundt pan with butter and set aside.

2. Mix the butter and sugar (brown and granulated) very well, till the mix is fluffy and light. Add the eggs one by one (and the yolk) till the batter is well beaten.

3. Take your vanilla bean, slit it down the middle with sharp knife and scrape out the fragrant, miniscule black grains. Add the innards of the bean and the vanilla essence to the batter.

4. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and add in batches to the cake batter till everything’s well mixed.

5. Transfer batter to bundt pan and put the pan into the oven for about 40-45 minutes or till the cake passes the toothpick test.

6. You can make the black tea caramel while the cake is baking. Pour the heavy cream into a small saucepan and let it simmer. Once heated through, throw the tea bags and the remains of the vanilla pod in the cream and cover with a lid. Let it sit for about half an hour.

7. Remove the tea from one of the teabags and mix it in the cream. Discard the vanilla and the other tea bag.

8. By this time your cake is probably through. Remove it from the oven and put it aside to cool completely.

9. Heat the water and sugar in a heavy bottomed pan and cook till the sugar starts to darken.

Note: Don’t let the caramel get too dark because it’ll start to get bitter and the tea will also add bitterness - too sauce might get too harsh for the soft vanilla cake.

10. Pour the cream into the caramel and whisk briskly. Add the butter and keep whisking. Take off the stove and let the caramel cool.

11. Once both the caramel and the cake are at room temperature, pour the caramel all over the cake.

 

 

RITU DALMIA'S ALMOND BISCOTTI

"I'm a better person when I have less on my plate." - Elizabeth Gilbert

 

 I was complaining, as usual, to a friend much wiser than me. I realize I'm not much of a benchmark for wisdom but don't let that undermine her, she is in fact very wise. I was whining about how lazy I am and recently I've pretty much given up, put my feet up and taken to watching as deadlines swoosh by my face. It's gotten so bad I was thinking of going on some sort of detox diet/juice cleanse.

 

Thankfully, I spoke to a more intelligent being before forking over a ton of cash for some ick green juice. It's kind of silly to think of our bodies or minds as mechanical objects that will perform at the same level consistently. Add the mental and physical abuse we put ourselves through and it's a miracle my body runs at all. When I think of the millions of minutiae that people consider impacts us and our behavior, diet of course but also exposure to sunlight, hydration and as per some, the phases of the moon, I guess I should learn to accept some of my lazy ass phases.

 

During the process of accepting this laziness I even managed to bake these surprisingly simple, low sugar, no butter biscotti. Perfect for pairing with a hot cup of coffee and a good book.

Makes about a dozen biscotti
Recipe adapted from Ritu Dalmia's Travelling Diva

 

What you’ll need:

150g flour
150 g almonds

75 g icing sugar
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 -2 tbsp orange zest

How to:

1. Toast the almonds in a dry pan and chop into slivers.

2. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. In another bowl, whisk together 2 eggs, vanilla and orange zest.

3. Pour the egg mixture into the flour and knead with your hands. Knead till you have a sticky dough – add a little flour to your hands if it’s getting TOO sticky.

4. Roll the dough into a ball and split the ball into quarters. Roll the quarter into a rectangular log.

5. Place on a baking tray with parchment paper or which is buttered down. Brush down the logs with the last beaten egg and bake for about 40 minutes or till golden.

 

 

6. Cool for about 20 minutes and then slice the loaf into biscuits. Don’t let the loaves cool for too long because you won’t be able to slice them without their crumbling.

 

7. Place the slices back on the baking tray and bake for 20 minutes (watching carefully to make sure the biscotti isn’t burning).

 

 

 

8. Remove the biscuits from the oven and let cool completely.

Note: Once they’re cool, store them in an airtight container because they’ll get soggy outside.