I recently bought an new KitchenAid Artisan 5-Quart Stand Mixer KSM150 which I was dying to try out.  I bought it because I like to bake biscotti, and I kept breaking my hand held mixers, even the good ones.  They just can’t hold up to the biscotti dough.

I am a biscotti fanatic, and am a bit obsessed with learning biscotti recipes, and finding the best to make for friends and family, so I had to get a better mixer.

I have to say, that I am totally in love with my new mixer.  I have always liked KitchenAid products anyway, and even the mixers that I wore out lasted longer when they were KitchenAid than the other brands that I bought.  The biscotti dough just is very dense and hard to mix, and you need a tougher mixer than the hand helds are.  Besides, I kept getting a sore arm from holding the hand held mixer in place in the bowl of biscotti dough.

The KitchenAid Artisan 5 Quart Stand Mixer that I bought has 325 watts of power, much more than any hand held mixer does, and can take the dense biscotti dough and mix it easily.  Not only that, but it has a tilt back head, so that it is easy to access the bowl of ingredients and add to it, scrape it, or take out a portion of the mixed dough to form into a loaf.  With biscotti, you have to form loaves of dough to bake.

Once I adjusted the beater clearance with the adjustment screw on the the mixer, the beaters worked perfectly every time, mixing in all of the ingredients into the biscotti dough without over mixing the dough.

My favorite biscotti recipe is a chocolate hazelnut biscotti in which both the hazelnuts and the chocolate chips are ground finely and mixed into the dough.  Because they are so dense, and the dough is somewhat dense to begin with, I ended up always having to hand mix the nuts and chocolate into the dough, which was very tiring.  Now I can let the KitchenAid Artisan mixer do the work, so I will be making a lot more of this particular biscotti recipe in the near future.  I can already see my family getting ready to eat them.  They don’t last too long in my house.

Just so that you can enjoy this recipe too, here it is below:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons Frangelico
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups unbleached flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup of hazelnuts, ground
4 oz of bittersweet chocolate, ground

Directions:

In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, Frangelico and vanilla. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Mix until well blended. Fold in  hazelnuts, and chocolate.  To make these biscotti look even better, you can just partially mix the hazelnuts and chocolate in at the same time, causing a ribbon of chocolate and nuts in the finished biscotti.

Line your baking sheet with parchment paper. Create a loaf on the parchment paper.

Bake in a preheated 325 degree oven between 25 and 40 minutes, depending on your oven.  The surface of the loaf should be lightly browned when you take it out. Let cool for a minimum of 15 minutes.

Slice crossways to create individual biscotti. Stand the biscotti up on the bottom edge (as if they were still in the loaf) with some space between them. Then bake again at 325 degrees for 10 minutes. Let cool. If you like them drier or harder bake longer the second time.