I need to find a way to sleep at night.
It took me forever fall asleep last night because it was the ninth day of Chinese New Year and it was fireworks galore outside my room window. While I used to be one of those kids who put fireworks in drains with my cousin brothers, I'm not overly fond of giant loud ones being set off for hours at an end past midnight. Some of us actually want to sleep.
It's been the third night in a row that I had trouble falling asleep - I used to have insomnia a few years ago but I thought I had recovered (question: can you recover from insomnia ? Or do you just get over it ?) and now it's rearing it's ugly head again. It's no fun lying in bed looking at the ceiling and trying to ignore my monkey brain chattering away in the silence. So I usually head back downstairs to read or watch some tv with my parents. If they're asleep, I creep downstairs to grab a banana and sneak back into my room to watch some foodie channels on YouTube. Makes sense to me.
Staying up late means I've been doing a lot of thinking, and one of the flyaway thoughts is because I've been offered a job of sorts - making tiramisu and brownies for a cafe near my university. I don't actually have to be there, just send the goodies over once every week or so. Which means I get to bake at home and make money out of it ! It seemed like the ideal part time job at first but then the cafe is a half hour drive away, and I'm not too sure about the pay. It's piqued my interest though and it certainly beats having to drive to work everyday...
Anyways I'm a little nervous about baking stuff to be sold like that. It's not like I haven't done it before, I've baked for plenty of people and they seemed pretty happy with it. Mostly I just like catering to my own tastes but since I have the biggest sweet tooth on earth, I have to ratchet down the sugar a notch or two every time I bake for my family. And I'm also the only one who can eat cake for every single meal of the day every day of the week and not get tired of it. Especially brownies. I love my brownies so much, it's become the one goodie I tinker with the most. I've baked almost every kind of brownie (except for the cakey ones, I don't like those) but I haven't gotten around to posting about them. I think it's also partially because I get so excited to eat that I inhale the prettiest pieces before I get around to taking any photos.
Brownies were also the first thing I ever baked for a boy. I had the biggest crush on him and I was in seventh heaven when he asked me out - it wasn't anything special, it was just to a nearby park for a jog and then some cake afterward. But it meant something to me, because it was the first official date I had ever been on and the first time I would ever bake for something I liked. And he loved them. I never did get the boy, but it gave me the confidence to start baking for more people. Yeah there are some flops where the frosting was "so sweet it made their teeth rattle" (in my defense, I liked the way it tasted) or when the cupcakes looked like a car crash but the looks on the faces of the recipients when they eat something that hits the right note, are always enough for me to get my mojo back. People ask me why I joined this line. I do love to eat to some extent, and I do love food and reading about it and learning and cooking, but the biggest reason and the thing that keeps me going is that I love to feed people what they want to eat. Nothing is better than hearing someone say that they think I've made the best brownies ever. Disclaimer: that's most likely untrue but a very nice thing to hear nonetheless.
It also made me love brownies more.
I've made it a mission of sorts to make my family be okay with - I won't say love, that's too much -eating baked goods with an ingredient that they don't like. My sister doesn't like pumpkin, my mom hates anything coffee flavoured (except coffee, oddly enough) and my dad can't stand the smell of cinnamon. Which means that if I ever wanted a pumpkin cinnamon roll with coffee icing, I'd be on my own. Har-dee-har-har. So far I've snuck pumpkin into a cheesecake and my sister ate it without comment, although I was sure the orange color would be a dead giveaway.. I told her I colored it orange for Halloween. The things I do..
My dad has eaten a few things with cinnamon in it but I don't count it as a victory because it wasn't the dominant flavor. Also, one of it had beer in it. Figures. My mom on the other hand, avoids coffee flavoured baked goods like the plague. I don't get it, but then again I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm not the biggest fan of coffee but I do love anything coffee flavored. And I like my coffee milky tasting.
So when she suggested I make some coffee flavoured cookies for her guests yesterday, I was a little surprised. She claimed it was because she overheard her colleagues mention that they loved coffee cookies and not because she had a sudden change of heart or anything. I grabbed the opportunity and made coffee flavoured biscotti. I found a recipe that called for hazelnuts and chocolate chips as well as the coffee, and let me just say that my mom, aside from having issues with her food tasting like her favorite beverage, didn't believe me when I told her hazelnuts were tasty (I don't like nuts but I love their flavor. Hazelnuts are by far my favorite because I'm best friends with my Nutella jar) and she wasn't the least bit impressed when I told her about biscotti. So I went ahead with the recipe and expected nothing.
When I pulled the tray of toasted hazelnuts out of the oven, the smell was heaven to my hazelnut spread-loving self. My mom snuck a few off the tray. I pretended not to notice.
The biscotti log came out of the oven. It looked nothing like a cookie. My mom said it smelled good. Hmm..
And then they were finally baked and cooling.
I kept them in a big cookie jar and left it in the kitchen. Only to have my mom pull out a piece or two to snack on. With her coffee.
Hazelnut-coffee and chocolate chip biscotti. Making converts out of disbelieving moms everywhere. Hehe :)
I took the recipe from here and I didn't change a single thing. The trick with biscotti is to not bake them so long they become hard and break your teeth, but just long enough just to dry them out and make them delightlfully crunchy. You want to let them cool first because they're sltill soft when they're warm. Serve, ideally, with a cup of coffee.
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