Nutty Lemon Biscotti - a Random Recipe

A double celebration - my 300th post is for Belleau Kitchen's 2nd Blogiversary Random Recipe challenge! This is the first time Dom has specified a baking recipe for his Random Recipe challenge, so I can take part with (almost) no cheating on choosing the recipe. I had to cheat slightly, as the first recipe I got when randomly opening the gorgeous book, Tea with Bea (recipes from Bea's of Bloomsbury) was Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti, and peanut butter isn't allowed in the house while FB is living here, as she has a severe peanut allergy! Fortunately the recipe on the next page was for these Nutty Lemon Biscotti, so it didn't feel too much like cheating to use that recipe instead.

Unfortunately I can't find an online version of these tasty lemon biscotti, but the ingredients and method are very similar to the recipe for Chocolate Peanut Butter Biscotti in the link above - more flour replaces the cocoa, honey replaces the golden syrup, white sugar and extra-virgin olive oil are used, and the dough is flavoured with the zest and juice of a large lemon and a pinch of ground cardamom before adding 50g each of whole almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios.

I haven't tried many biscotti recipes, and these may not have dried out enough, as once again, I forgot that this book uses a fan oven when giving cooking temperatures, but it was really good to make a batch of biscotti that weren't tooth-breakingly hard!

The flavour was excellent too, but you really have to like whole nuts to enjoy these fully - I prefer my nuts in smaller pieces, although recently I've coming to appreciate whole nuts more.

These biscotti recipes both use a little oil instead of butter, which makes them suitable for my low saturated fat baking. The lemon recipe suggests that dried fruits or chocolate chips can be used instead of nuts, such as sour cherries, dried apricots and white chocolate - so anyone with a tree nut allergy can still enjoy the basic recipe.