End of the year Gifts; Part II

I never like to bake or create just one kind of goodie.  I like variety and I like to present variety.  Along with the honeycomb (from previous post) we made two flavors of biscotti and the molasses ginger chews from a previous post.

I enlisted my friend, Jeni, to spend the day in the kitchen with me and two of us had lots of fun.  Jeni's kids are in different grades than my kids, so this was the perfect baking partner.  Having a partner, certainly sped up the process, but more importantly it made it a whole lot more fun.

We started early, making the doughs for both the two recipes of the biscotti's and the molasses chews (see 6/18/09 post).  I had made the chocolate biscotti the previous week, loved them and wanted to make them again.  We used the Lemon Pistachio base, also from Nick Maglieri's Cookies Unlimited, but switched out the pistachios for the dried apricots, crystallized ginger and toasted almonds.  I liked this recipe, but didn't love it.  It was a little too soft.  I like a crisper, crunchier cookie, like the one I make at the holiday times.

Since we were already using the tempering machine for the honeycomb, we thought we would make our biscotti's a little more festive.