Make Your Own Biscotti

" For a delicious coffee companion, try this! I don't know about you, but when I go to a coffee shop, I love getting a little treat of biscotti, but I'm here to tell you it's so easy to make your own at home. All you have to do is take your favorite bar cookie recipe, and I've chosen chocolate chip bars because I think that makes these really fabulous, and baked them in a 9 by 9 inch baking pan. Now, I've lined my pan with foil, just to make it super easy to get those bars out when I'm ready to cut them. So then what I'm gonna do is remove the bars from the pan by just lifting up on the foil, and then, I'll just take the foil off and put it onto my cutting board. You can just peel back that foil. Now, these biscotti are a little bit longer than I'm sure you're used to seeing in the coffee shops, but I think that makes them extra special. So I'm just gonna take a serrated knife, and cut them just, you know, across-wise, into some strips. Now, you can make them as thick or as thin you'd like. Making them a little bit thicker helps them to keep a little more sturdy, so I like to go about three-fourths inch, maybe an inch. Now, the trick to making these biscotti is the second baking time. So what you do is you actually take these little strips, and put them on a baking sheet. Now, you wanna set them cut side down, and then, you bake them at 325 degrees for another 20 minutes. Now, what that's gonna do is make them nice and crisp and get them a little bit dried out, `cause it has that texture that we all love with biscotti. So once you're done baking them the second time, you're gonna wanna cool them on a wire rack. Now, I've already got some that I've baked and cooled, and you can tell they've gotten a little bit darker brown, but not much. They're gonna keep their color pretty well, but they're just nice, and dry, and crisp, and it has that great texture. Now to make them extra special, I love to dip them in chocolate. I mean, I think you can make anything better by dipping it in chocolate, or you can drizzle it if you'd like. So I've just got some of my favorite chocolate here in a bowl, and I've melted that up with a little bit of shortening just so that it's a little bit thinner. It makes it a little easier to dip things into, and then, it helps set it up really nicely. And I'll just use my spatula to help guide it on to my biscotti. And then, simply put, you know, you wanna get any of the excess chocolate off so that it's not dripping off your biscotti, and then put it on a wax paper-lined baking sheet. So give these biscotti to a friend for a gift or keep them at home for yourself for a perfect time-out treat during the busy holiday season."