Cantuccini recipe

I realized the other day that I am doing an Erasmus in Italy, a country with great food, yet I have never shared any recipe on here. Today is the day I fix this mistake and share with you the recipe of some Italian biscuits that I like very much: the Cantuccini. I like them because they are very crunchy and can be found in different flavors, like chocolate, almonds, hazelnuts... My personal favorite flavor is almonds so I’ll share this recipe here, but if you want another flavor all you have to do is basically replace the almonds with hazelnuts or chocolate chip. As these biscuits are very hard and dry, I recommended eating them during a coffee / tea break, I think that’s when they taste the best.

The time needed to prepare these biscuits is approximately 1 hour and a half.

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Ingredients needed:

• Plain flour (250g);
• Baking powder (1 teaspoon);
• Caster sugar (180g);
• Vanilla sugar (2 teaspoons);
• Salt (1 pinch);
• Melted butter (25g);
• Eggs (2);
• Chopped almonds (175g).

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Method to follow:

1. Take a separate bowl and mix together the flour with the baking powder, the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the salt. Once everything is mixed together, form into a mound with a hollow in the middle.
2. Add the melted butter and the eggs in the hollow and knead it to make a dough. Add the chopped almonds and knead again. Then form a ball (you can add a little more flour if you need). Cover it and chill for about 30 minutes.



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3. Put baking paper on your baking tray and preheat your oven to 200 °C.
4. Cut the dough into 6 pieces of around 25cm each. Put them all on the baking tray (be careful and pay attention to leaving some space between each of the cantuccini as they will spread a little whilst cooking and you don't want them to get stuck together), and leave them in the preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes.
5. Take them out of the oven and give them a little time to cool down, then cut them into slices of about 1 cm each. Put them back on the baking tray and in the oven for another 8 to 10 minutes at 200°C, until they turn golden-brown. Take a look at them from time to time and remove them from the oven depending on how you prefer them to be.

This recipe should give you around 40 cantuccini. You can have them for breakfast, dessert or at coffee / tea time, which is my favorite. As the biscuits are quite dry and hard, you can dip them in your coffee, milk or hot chocolate!

This is what your Cantuccini should look like at the end. I like them not too cook so that’s why they don’t look so brown. You do as you prefer! Now all you have to do is enjoy!

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