"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."A oft-misattributed quote from Paul Erdos in fact invented by the coffee-addicted Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi. Yes, most of us students are addicted to coffee too. In fact, this morning I woke up an hour later than usual and already had a caffeine withdrawal headache (read: definitely not a hangover.)
I may be bad, but I think my coffee intake is pretty average... I buy one or two coffees every day (I go to a drip coffee bar Beckman Bistro at Stanford SoM). That's like $2.50 every day. If I work 200 days a year (lets face it, that's a reasonable estimate), we're looking at half a grand a year. That is a lot of money that I could be putting into retirement (oh yeah -- check out this awesome retirement guide for graduate students by Brandon Curtis here). I think I can understand why coffee is expensive, between farmers, roasters, distributors and baristas). Pastries, on the other hand, are way too expensive.
Lets start with biscotti. Coffee shops sell them individually wrapped for a couple of bucks. For a dry cookie with six ingredients, that seems really really unreasonable, especially for a grad student budget. Biscotti are extremely easy to make, and last forever.
Fun facts: Wikipedia claims the cookie's name is derived from Latin and refers to their "twice baked" recipe. My Italian colleague Carolina Tropini reminds me that if you want to impress your PI, remember to offer them either a single biscotto, or a few biscotti. Here's a recipe I adapted and simplified (from here). I really like it because it makes consistently good crunchy biscotti. Also, they end up being ~10 cents each.
Almond Biscotti (30 slices)
Ingredients
+ 2 cups flour
+ 1 cup sugar
+ 1 teaspoon baking powder
+ 1/8 teaspoon salt
+ Pack of raw unsalted almonds
+ 3 large eggs
+ Splash of Amaretto
Preparation
Preheat oven to 300F. Don't bother with parchment, these cookies don't stick.
Mix all the ingredients except almonds together until just combined. It'll be a really wet dough. Don't worry about it. Shape it into a loaf thing like in the photo above and cover the entire surface area with almonds (they'll spread out as the dough rises). Bake it for about 45 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean after sticking it into the dough.
Now remove it from the oven, and let it cool down for 10 minutes. Then unstick the loaf and slice it into fairly thin diagonal cookies. Once that's all done, lay them flat back on the same cookie sheet and cook at 320F until browned. The cookies will harden as they cool down, so don't use their consistency as an indicator of "done-ness". Make yourself some coffee and enjoy!
