Lemon Biscotti with Vanilla, Olive Oil, and Almonds

“This is a top three Fooduzzi recipe,” my boyfriend stated as he dove into his third biscotti of the morning.

With a review like that, how can you not be excited about these?

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I love biscotti, and I grew up having them a lot. We have a biscotti shop here in Pittsburgh that we’d go to when we were in the area, and my very Italian family often had biscotti as a snack option with tea, coffee, or (for the young ones) hot chocolate.

I’m typically not a crunchy cookie person (#teamchewy), but biscotti is a completely different beast for me.

You want them crisp so that they can be dipped or dunked in some sort of hot liquid before devouring. It’s one of my favorite food experiences, to be honest –– a steamy cup of coffee or tea and a crunchy biscotti or two? The very best.

I’d gravitate towards the chocolate-coated biscotti with almonds when I was younger, but when I decided I wanted to make a vegan biscotti recipe, I figured I’d try and make a biscotti flavor I had never had before.

Enter: this recipe!

The flavors are perfectly balanced (the tang of lemon! the sweet aromatic vanilla! the fragrant olive oil! the rich almonds!), they’re tasty enough to enjoy on their own, and, of course, they’re 100% vegan.

It starts with flour, as most cookies do. The all-purpose variety is all you need here. Add some sugar, vanilla extract (or, for bonus points, vanilla bean paste!), lemon zest, olive oil, baking powder, salt, and aquafaba (our egg replacer!).

I know, my Italian ancestors are probably cringing. But aquafaba is a great egg replacer here!

It’s light, it mixes real well, and it’s cheap, as it comes from a can of chickpeas. You could probably use a store-bought egg replacer powder here as well, but the aquafaba works just fine.

You’ll also add some almonds, and this is the reason why I’ve tested this recipe three times (much to my boyfriend’s delight). I love whole almonds in my biscotti. Not only is it visually-appealing, but I really love the different texture it brings to the whole biscotti-eating experience.

That said, whole almonds make it a wee more difficult to get perfectly cut biscotti. The biscotti seems to crumble a bit more when you hit a whole almond with your knife, especially since this is a more tender vegan cookie.

Of course, broken biscotti still tastes delicious, so I didn’t really care. But I know that may be a problem for you. The photos here are of the whole almond biscotti, but feel free to use sliced or slivered almonds if you want less breakage.

And an interesting thing about biscotti: you actually bake it twice! Once as a log and again once you slice the log into individual biscotti. It helps the cookie dry out and take on that characteristically crunchy texture.

Enjoy this one, friends! It’s a goodun.

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