Coffee and Ginger, Hazelnut, Fig and Chocolate Spelt Cantuccini

I promised you my winning ‘coffee and….’ recipe last week and so here it is. The challenge was designed by Union Roasted for our day out to their roastery to get us thinking about what would pair best with coffee. In doing so thus encouraging us to think about not just what we’re used to accompanying our favourite beverage, but to dig a little deeper and taste characteristics and flavour nuances that could be extricated by a clever pairing, or at least that’s how I went about my entry.

You might also like: Pump Street Bakery Sourdough and Sea Salt Chocolate

My initial thoughts were to bring along some single origin chocolate as, more often than not, this is my own preferred coffee partner. A Madagascan chocolate with it’s fruity red berry notes complementing and enhancing a coffee from Costa Rica, with it’s similar flavours. Or perhaps something really mellow, smooth, rich and….well, chocolatey like Akesson’s Fazenda Monte Alegre from Brazil, so that the sometimes bold flavours of each aren’t struggling against each other too much. You could of course, go right to the other end of the scale with something that really packs a punch like Duffy’s Academy of Chocolate award winning Honduras Indio Rojos, with it’s seriously rich flavours of currents, orange zest and even a touch of coffee. But then it all started to get a bit serious on Twitter with competitors talking about baking up a storm, and my own suppressed competitive streak came to the fore; it might be nice to enter a competition, but it’s even nicer to win….oh dear.

I decided on my soft biscotti or cantuccini recipe mainly because they’re all flavours I particularly like, they also seemed in keeping with, if not the weather a the moment, then at least what we’d normally expect from Autumn. I was also inspired by the recent Coffee Saturday Biscotti Bake-off orgnised by Daniel Young that I didn’t get the chance to enter. I think the biscuits would happily pair well with most coffees, but there’s quite a few ingredients there so I wouldn’t suggest anything too delicate, maybe a nice mild, smooth and sweet Ethiopian Yirgacheffe as was suggested by Jeremy and Steven on the day.

Ginger, Hazelnut, Fig and Chocolate Spelt Biscotti:

• 200g wholegrain spelt flour
• 30g softened butter
• 1 egg beaten
• 125g light muscovado sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 100g blanched hazelnuts roghly halfed
• 50g good dark chocolate
• 50g dried figs
• 2 pieces stem ginger chopped with a glug of the syrup
• half a teaspoon cinnamon
• pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line a large baking tray with baking paper.

Cream the butter and sugar, add the egg, then sift in the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir in all your other ingredients and tip out on to a flour dusted work surface.

Work the dough into a long sausage shape almost the length of the tray and flatten slightly so the width is more than the height. Place in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes until it’s golden but still quite soft. While still hot quickly slice into the dough at an angle in about 2 cm spaces then go back and cut all the way through; as the dough cools this gets harder to do so work quite quickly.

Gently lay the slices back on the baking tray and return to the oven for around 5-10 minutes to toast them, they should be darker around the edges but still a little soft in the centre.

Serve with the coffee of your choice. Don’t forget you can get a 10% discount on any of Union’s coffees online if you use the checkout code ‘FAERIE10′ www.unionroasted.com