Coffee accompaniments

You put a lot of effort into making your morning or after-dinner cup of coffee the best that it can be. It seems a shame, then, to accompany it with a mere slice of buttered toast.

So what goes with coffee? Lots of things, especially cookies, chocolate and other things slightly sweet.

What doesn't go well is anything that can overwhelm (or be overwhelmed by) the coffee, Pizza, for example. Lemon meringue pie. Or yakitori. Or even a slice of buttered toast. Wrong. All wrong.

But the cookies and chocolate. Ah, yes.

A traditional Italian accompaniment to espresso is biscotti, a thick, twice-baked almond flavored cookie. This crunchy cookie is perfect for dipping in a cup of coffee, which softens the cookie to melt-in-your-mouth consistency.

Laura Fenton of Circus Espresso Bars (http://www.island.net/~circus/) offers the following recipe that she found on the internet and modified to suit Japanese ingredients.

Laura's Biscotti

Starbucks Dark Chocolate Dusted Biscotti

Your faithful correspondent thought he had died and gone to heaven the first time he bit into one of these bite-size bits. A dusting of cocoa powder covers a thin layer of bittersweet chocolate which, in turn, covers a swirl of plain and chocolate biscotti. At $6.95 for about 20 large nuggets, they're not exactly cheap, but they're worth it. If you can limit yourself to one a day, you have more will power than either I or my wife. I have friends who won't leave my house until they've been given their 'goodbye' nugget.

Steve's Chocolate Espresso Beans