Beautiful Foodies: "Twice cooked"

[note: last post before finals crunch time starts.. foresee a lot of baking after those are done :)] Soooo, I've been kind of obsessed with ginger and molasses lately.. the gingerbread loaf from Starbucks is a-m-a-z-i-n-g! If you haven't tried it you MUST. It's really sad that they don't serve that year-round. (the cream cheese frosting is also awesome.)

I've been looking for ways to use the molasses that was leftover from making those gingersnaps, and I was going to a friend's house for dinner so I wanted to bring something.. I stumbled across this gingerbread biscotti recipe, which was adapted from the Joy of Baking recipe. And thus, I decided to make biscotti for the first time. It seemed like an extremely simple recipe and I didn't even have all the ingredients -- I left out the oats and added a cup of mini chocolate chips. I also added about a tbsp of freshly grated ginger, which probably made them a little more on the chewy side. These were such a hit, I couldn't believe how much everybody liked them! They were nice and hard to the touch but were, at the same time, moist and a bit chewy. Who knew that biscotti were easier to make than cookies?! I'm definitely going to make these again, maybe adding some dried cranberries next time.

This was after baking the 2 loaves.. the dough was extremely sticky so it was pretty difficult to shape into anything. Also in the photos from the recipe I used their loaves were long & skinny.. the way I did mine was basically as you see in this photo; they did not really spread out too much.