Almond Biscotti

My parents have been to Italy 3 times. My mom is just in love with the place. She even took an Italian cooking class last fall through the community center. Which is why I decided on biscotti for her Mother's Day gift. Since I've only made biscotti once (Nonni or someone got a jar of dry ingredients for biscotti back when I was in junior high so she, Auntie Vicki, and Auntie Chauch showed me how) I decided on a simple recipe. I ended up also choosing a recipe from one of the magazines I've been typing up.

For those who don't know: biscotti are twice-baked cookies. You make the dough, form it into two logs, and bake the first time. They come out like a soft cookie. Then, you cut the logs into strips and lay the strips on a cookie sheet cut side up and bake them again. The end result is a crunchy cookie. Also, if your dough looks crumbly like this:

don't worry. I think that's how it's supposed to look since I put a handful of dough in my fist and got this:

It's almost like Play-doh. Kneading it in step 3 will help bring it together too.

Simple Neapolitan Cupcakes

Over the last few months I've been working on a bit of a project while waiting on the status of a job. You see, I've become a bit of a ... collector ... of those recipe magazines you can get from the magazine rack at stores. So I decided to create a searchable database of the recipes in these magazines that I would bake since there's not always an index and I have way more magazines than I do cookbooks.

I've also been watching a lot of Food Network lately (don't ask why the sudden change - it's a bit complicated, among other reasons). Especially after I noticed that the weekday morning Cupcake Wars episodes were ones I'd never seen before. Which just made me want to make cupcakes. And since I'm not sure how to store them just for me, I decided to make them for whatever Mom wanted to do for Mother's Day. Since I've been pinning a lot of neapolitan desserts lately, I specifically wanted to make neapolitan cupcakes. I ended up finding a recipe in my new database.

I did make one change: I replaced the strawberry with raspberry for the frosting since my dad doesn't like strawberries. I know it was for Mother's Day, but that wouldn't have stopped him from complaining that he couldn't have the dessert.