Chocolate and almond biscuits to serve with coffee

I really got the urge yesterday. Late-night baking. And I mean late, late. I started at 23 h. Luckily, this recipe for crumbly biscuits is faster than a Pendolino train, and you certainly don’t need to reserve a seat. A little over half an hour and the biscuits are ready; if you’re making two batches, you’ll be done in an hour. Perfect!

Actually, I was supposed to make these biscuits with Ninka, hopefully kicking off a series of Christmas bakes. Yesterday, though, Ninka asked for pizza for lunch and pancakes for supper, so there wasn’t much room for baking in between—and not much enthusiasm either. Especially since she worked hard kneading the pizza dough with me and practically made her own pizza herself, and more or less made the pancake batter on her own too.

So I postponed the baking until Thursday, but here’s the catch: on Thursday Ninka has a friend’s birthday party and is heading straight there after school… a party for seven-year-olds. So that put paid to the biscuits.

And I’d already bought all the ingredients! (Yes, that’s me moaning and groaning.) Because once I have all those ingredients (meaning a tonne of chocolate and almonds, never mind the other nuts I bought for the occasion which, let’s say, went missing in action), I get restless. And I really did get carried away, to the point of starting to bake at 23 h.

Yes. While the second batch was baking, the first had cooled a little and I tried one. Well, only half. They’re good, if not perfect. They’re not overly sweet (I also mention somewhere below that if you want coffee-shop sweetness, just add a little more sugar), they’re crumbly but not hard. And they’re insanely chocolatey. But as you can see from the ingredients, I used chocolates that weren’t overly sweet, with salty additions too. That really brings out their distinctive flavour. Give them a try!

At a glance:

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 20 minutes

Baking temperature: 160 degrees Celsius

Serves: 10 – 12 substantial biscuits

Calories: loads of calories

Ingredients for crumbly chocolate biscuits:

• 180 grams of butter (almost a block)
• 250 grams of wheat flour
• 2 hen’s eggs
• 160 grams of assorted chocolates (I used caramel chocolate with salted peanuts, dark chocolate, and chocolate with pretzels)
• 50 grams of almonds
• 3 tablespoons of sugar (if you want them sweeter, add 1 – 2 more tablespoons; my biscuits aren’t overly sweet)
• 1 tablespoon of almond-flavoured sugar
• a level teaspoon of cinnamon
• half a teaspoon of salt

How to make chocolate and almond biscuits that are perfect with coffee:

I started by getting all the ingredients ready. I poured boiling water over the almonds and set them aside for a few minutes. Meanwhile, I chopped all the chocolates into small cubes and transferred them to a small bowl.

I put the room-temperature butter (so, soft butter) in a tall bowl, added the sugar, almond-flavoured sugar and cinnamon, and started beating with a mixer on low speed (why not—I finally bought myself a mixer). You want a smooth mixture. Next, I added the two eggs and beat for another 2 – 3 minutes. Finally, I added the flour and briefly mixed to make a dough that wasn’t too stiff (one of the photos shows what it should look like), then gave everything another thorough mix with a spoon.

I drained the almonds that had been soaking in boiling water, removed their skins and chopped them into several pieces (as with the chocolate). I mixed them with the chocolates and added them to the dough. I mixed thoroughly with a spoon so that the dough was uniform (meaning the chocolate wasn’t all in one place with none in the rest of the dough).

The dough is sticky and very greasy (ha, eureka! It is practically a whole block of butter, after all), but you can shape it into oval biscuits.

So next I preheated the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. I lined two oven trays with baking paper. I placed oval biscuits on the paper, pressing them down so that they stuck to it and became flat and round. I baked them for exactly 20 minutes, dividing the baking into two batches. This makes about 10 – 12 fairly large biscuits.

They’re not overly sweet, which suits me, but if you prefer them like the ones in coffee shops, add 1 – 2 more tablespoons of sugar. Enjoy!