The Recipe Room

As the name suggests, florentines originated in the Italian city of Florence. The Italians make excellent desserts in the Tuscany region, including Biscotti de Prato.

Florentines are fragile, fruity sensations that are often made with dark chocolate, but I prefer them with milk chocolate.  The trickiest bit of the process is getting a good round shape to your biscuit, so I think it’s best to be relaxed about that, and enjoy the biscuits a little uneven around the edges.  They’ll still taste just as wonderful!  You can enjoy fruity milk chocolate florentines as a rather special biscuit snack; or dress them up for after-dinner with creams, sauces and liqueurs, for a rich or romantic dessert.

Ingredients:

• 150g good quality milk chocolate, broken into pieces
• 60g unsalted butter
• 30g glacé cherries
• 55g caster sugar
• 2 tbsp double cream
• 30g sultanas or raisins
• 55g flaked almonds
• 20g candied peel mix
• 2tsbp plain flour

Preparation Guidelines:

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC and lightly grease a large non-stick baking tray with a pat of butter.
2. Chop the cherries into rough pieces and set them to one side.
3. Melt the butter and the sugar together in a saucepan on a gentle heat until melted, stirring them together.  Then bring the temperature up until the mixture boils.  Remove from the heat and whilst the mixture is still hot, add in the dried fruit, almonds, flour, glacé cherries and the double cream.  Combine the ingredients together.
4. Lift teaspoonfuls of the mixture out and place them on the prepared baking tray, spaced widely apart so as not to touch and stick when they spread.  It’s best to cook the biscuits in 2 batches or more and really give them plenty of space.  Pop each batch in the oven for around 8 minutes.  Remove them and push each biscuit into a neat circle using a round, oiled biscuit cutter.  Bake them again for about 2 minutes before transferring them onto a clean sheet of grease-proof baking parchment to cool.
5. Melt the chocolate in a pan.  Once the Florentines have cooled, turn them upside-down and use a palette knife, or large blunt knife to spread the melted chocolate across the flat surface of the biscuit which is now on top.  Transfer the biscuits to a clean sheet of paper to set.
   

Time: 15 minutes to prepare, 25-35 minutes to cook

Cocoa Treats: 12-15

Tags: candied peel, caster sugar, chocolate recipes, cocoa treats, double cream, flaked almonds, flour, Fruity Milk Chocolate Florentines, glacé cherries, milk chocolate, sultanas, unsalted butter

This entry was posted on Monday, 9 July, 2012 at 8:05 pm by Christina Warren and is filed under Desserts, Less than 1 hour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment, or make a trackback from your own blog.