My favorite thing about the upcoming holidays and cooler weather is being able to snuggle up with a warm cup of coffee and some sort of dipper, like biscotti. I enjoy making homemade biscotti like pumpkin biscotti and toffee biscotti. Although the occasional store bought is just as good. I love taking the hard cookie and dipping it into my hot coffee. The coffee flavor with the soften cookie is just soothing to my soul. With the crazy holiday shoppers this season, if I can have a moment to sit down, dunk some biscotti into a good cup of coffee, I’ll be the happiest girl ever. Plus the customers will thank me for that. ;)
Okay so this post isn’t about how I relax with biscotti, it is about mandel bread! My mom is Jewish, which I guess makes me part Jewish? I love Jewish food but I’ve never experienced much with their sweets. My mom heard of mandel bread and was excited I was going to make some.
The lovely Ashley at The Edible Perspective kept posting about Mandel Bread and how this her favorite cookie that her grandma makes. After her many attempts at making this cookie I couldn’t take it any longer and I had to make them as well. It really is an easy cookie to make. Not much kitchen mess since all it requires is a wooden spoon, a bowl and some elbow grease.
Like Ashley, I also ran into some problems. I ran out of FLOUR! I only had 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour remaining. Do I sub in spelt flour, whole wheat flour?? I found whole wheat pastry flour. My experience with the pastry flour has not been so good, everything always comes out heavy and never rises. Well I took a shot and luckily I had just enough flour total to make these cookies. The cookies tasted wonderful and had the perfect mandel rise. I used 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour and 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat pastry flour.
Oh no!
The dough was very sticky, so it was a challenged to spread it out onto the cookie sheet. I do this with biscotti, so I decided to try it out on mandel bread. Wet your hands when you are trying to spread out the dough and shape it. It works like a charm!
A little well done but perfect.
I made these Halloween night and brought half the batch to a friend’s house. Everyone loved them, especially with their evening cup of coffee. I actually had to make a copy of the recipe for several people that night. These cookies are light, not sweet but sweet enough with the right amount of vanilla and the buttery walnuts. These cookies reminded me of the Stella D’oro Almond Toasts I use to buy.
Can’t wait to make these again and store some in the freezer. I never had a chance to save any because they disappeared very quickly!
To get the original recipe for Mandel Bread please click this link HERE, and it will direct you over to Ashley’s recipe.
Okay and if that wasn’t enough. I also had to try mandel bread on top of my oat bran one morning! I used 1/3 cup oat bran, 1 tbsp ground flax and 1 cup of water. I added a dash of cinnamon and stevia once it started to boil. My oat bran is topped with a 1 tbsp of creamy almond butter, 1/2 sliced banana and crumbled mandel bread!
Happy Mandel Bread Baking!
Fallon
2 comments:
Ahhh, the perfect oat topping!!! They look great! Still really weird though..the tops of yours are really smooth and mine were pretty smooth too. When my aunt makes them they're always really rough on top. I thought maybe I was stirring the batter too smooth and that helped a little. I still can't get them 100% just right. They still taste great though!! Thanks for the link love and glad you enjoyed them!! I eat one out of the freezer almost every morning. :)
Be still my heart. Looks so good.
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