This Post is Sponsored by Doves Farm Organic Flour

It is now irrefutably Christmas baking season and I am throwing myself in to it wholeheartedly. We always have plenty of cakes and puddings, but I think we need more cookies. Those recipes that are great to have on hand for when relatives drop round or for when you’re fed up of shop bought mince pies. 

These biscotti are incredibly easy to make, requiring almost no equipment and a few delicious ingredients. The hero ingredient is Doves Farm Organic Wholemeal Spelt Flour, which adds a slightly sweet nutty flour. Now for those of you who haven’t used spelt, it’s a great introduction to using alternative grains. Firstly it’s important to note that whilst Spelt has less gluten than regular wheat flour it is not a gluten free flour, so it is not appropriate for those with gluten allergies or for coeliacs.. Because of its high protein content and its relatively good level of gluten I find you can often switch it for plain flour fully, although for some recipes like cakes/muffins I tend to use a blend with regular wheat flour to get the texture I want. This is mainly because in recipes where gluten is needed to create structure, like in cakes, the gluten the flour has isn’t as good at creating this type of structure. In cookies or pastry I will often use 100% spelt with less noticeable differences and just an improvement in flavour. With recipes like breads or cake an important thing to note is the flour’s absorption level. The flour tends to absorb more moisture than regular wheat flour so less liquid ingredients are required. If you are wanting to experiment with spelt or other ancient grains I find a good place to start is to use spelt for 25% of the required flour and then work upwards. 

Also for those of you that followed my recent sourdough adventures you might remember that I love to add a small amount of spelt when making sourdough, because the type of gluten present in spelt flour leads to dough with greater extensibility which in my experience gives a more open crumb.

For these biscotti which I make on the smaller side (almost like the size of cantucci) I wanted to go with a flavour we often associate with Christmas without being out and out Christmas and what better than chocolate orange? Growing up my grandfather would regularly make me and his other grandkids a batch of orange chocolates and it was always one of my favourite things. For the chocolate element I have included cocoa nibs in the biscotti and coated the biscuits in milk chocolate. Normally biscotti, which is an unusually crunchy biscuit, is served alongside coffee and dunked to help it soften. With my version being coated in chocolate when you dunk them it ends up giving the coffee a mocha vibe, so a double win as far as I am concerned. 

Doves Farm Organic Wholemeal Spelt Flour is available from Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Tesco

Chocolate Orange Spelt Biscotti
Makes Around 25

Biscotti
335g Doves Farm Organic Wholemeal Spelt Flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
150g caster sugar
3 tbsp honey
50g unsalted butter
Zest of 2 oranges
2 large eggs
100g raw, skin on, almonds
50g cacoa nibs

Coating
200g milk chocolate 
Zest of 1 orange

Preheat the oven to 180ºC (160ºC Fan) and line a large baking tray with parchment paper. 

In a large bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Place the honey, butter and orange zest and place into a small saucepan and over low/medium heat cook until the butter has melted and the mixture is combined. Set aside for 5 minutes to cool.

Pour the butter mixture, eggs, almonds and cacoa nibs into the bowl with the flour and use a wooden spoon to stir together to form a soft dough. Dust the worksurface with more flour and turn out the dough and cut into two even pieces. Roll each piece into a log that is 5cm wide and place onto the prepared baking tray.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 25 minutes or until golden brown then remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Once cooled use a large serrated knife to cut into slices, about 2cm wide. Turn the slices cut side up and bake for a further 10 minutes. Remove and allow to cool fully. At this stage you can store the cookies in an airtight container for up to two weeks. But if you want to serve them as I prefer, melt the chocolate and dip the cookies halfway into the chocolate. Allow any excess to drip back into the chocolate before transferring to a sheet of parchment. Once all of the cookies have been dipped grate the orange zest over the cookies. Set in the fridge for 15 minutes or until the chocolate has set. Made like this the cookies are best within a week or so.