Crunchy, Italian-style biscotti studded with puddles of dark chocolate, toasted hazelnuts, and bright winter clementines. This simple biscotti recipe will make a perfect addition to your holiday cookie baking.

Making friends as an adult is hard. Moving to a new city and then making friends as an adult is even harder. Moving to a new city, running your own business completely from your home and then making friends as an adult is really really hard. So many of our relationships are built on shared experiences—there are friends you went to high school with, those you went to college with, and co-workers turned friends—but how do you find your people in an entirely new place when there aren’t many other people around to connect with?

This past six months in Minneapolis has been so much fun. We’ve gotten to explore a brand new city, eaten at so many new restaurants, enjoyed beautiful summer and fall weather, and so much more. But it’s also been really lonely at times. Since I work entirely from home as a freelancer and run a business that I built by myself, I’ve found it’s been a bit tricky to meet new people. I’ve made a few local internet-turned-real-life friends which has been really neat. In fact, in having coffee with Amanda from HeartBeet Kitchen, I met the very first person to have the same job as me and that was a super fun experience.

I’ve also been very blessed to have a husband with a job that involves people. His co-workers and their families have been so generous in helping us create a little home here in the North. Sometimes, it’s easy for me to give into to feeling sorry for myself. To break down and cry because I miss my people who now live thousands of miles away and because I feel like I can count all of my Minneapolis friends on one hand. But when I step back and think about it, I realize how lucky I am to have these few new friends because in the span of just a few months, they’ve turned into family.

It’s only a few times in your life where you meet someone and it’s instantly easy. It was easy when I met my best friend back on the first week of 10th grade and when I met my sorority sister turned real life sister-in-law in college. It was easy when I met my very best teacher friend on the first day of new teacher orientation my first year in Nashville and when we moved to Seattle where we found friends who we could make curry chicken tacos with on a Sunday afternoon in our pajamas. And lucky me, I found it again here in Minneapolis.

I’ve decided, as I get older, that I would way rather have a handful of friends that I can call no matter what, who can hang out on our couch and watch the Bachelorette or make biscotti with than a million acquaintances.

homemade Italian-style biscotti

My Minneapolis BFF and I had a cookie baking day last week where we used a ridiculous amount of butter and made a giant mess in my kitchen. Oh, and we made these biscotti.

These are a traditional Italian-style biscotti (adapted from Emiko Davies’ most recent book Torte Della Nonna), studded with toasted hazelnuts, clementine juice and zest, and big hunks of dark chocolate. They are super easy to adapt with whatever nut + citrus + chocolate combination you prefer and make a great Christmas cookie since they only get better as the days go by.

Like all Italian biscotti, these cookies are twice-baked. After mixing all of our wet and dry ingredients together into a fairly dense dough, we turn it out on a floured work surface and knead it a bit to make sure all of the flour bits are incorporated. Then we’ll sprinkle in our add-ins and knead it a bit more to ensure even distribution. The dough is then shaped into two rectangular logs, brushed with egg wash and baked until deeply golden brown. The logs cool for a few minutes and then we’ll use a sharp serrated knife to cut individual cookies. The long cookies are then baked again to ensure maximum crunchiness.

tips and substitutions

Maybe it’s the little Florida baby in me, but I love citrus season so much. There’s something about how in the darkest, coldest, parts of winter we get to reap the brightest bits of produce that just makes me giddy. I started seeing blood oranges and mandarins pop up in my grocery stores a few weeks ago, so you can bet that when I found a big bag of beautiful clementines, I jumped on it. You can easily substitute whatever citrus juice and zest looks the most exciting to you if you can’t find clementines.

I do have a small disclaimer about this recipe—slicing the biscotti will cause your chocolate to smear a bit. (This is why many biscotti recipes only incorporate nuts or dried fruits and then dip the cookies in chocolate after baking, but I really really wanted the chocolate scattered throughout). It’s inevitable that slicing the warm cookie log will cause the hot chocolate puddles to smear. I think it’s a small price to pay for having little pockets of chocolate studded throughout the final cookie, but if that really bothers you, you can absolutely omit the chocolate in the cookie dough and then melt your chocolate and dip your cooled cookies in it post-bake.