Can't help you with the cookie recipe, but I've always thought of cantucci/cantuccini as being "baby" biscotti. The sizes are quite different when my Italian friend makes them. Maybe it's regional?

It sounds like you're looking for something like a fortune cookie or a tozzetti (in the biscotti/cantucci family), or a plain drop cookie. Here's a link--you can probably adjust the sugar a bit...Recipe from King Arthur Flour website

Maybe some variation of a lace cookie. Linking a recipe but it probably is too sweet and has more fat than you're wanting.

https://addapinch.com/oatmeal-lace-cookies-recipe/

Search for olive oil cookies. There are lots of variations, some sweet (but not too sweet) and some a little savory with lemon and thyme, for example. Not sure if they are as crisp as you desire.

sooz, ci_lantro, Olychick, thanks. The olive oil cookies sound like the most promising. sooz, all the biscotti I've seen in Italy have been that small size, so I don't know whether large biscotti have a different name here. As you may know, "biscotti" in Italian is the generic word for cookies. Olychick, do you by any chance live in Olympia, Washington? I lived there for a decade.

You're looking for a plain vanilla kind of cookie? If not, I'd go for something like a gingersnap or molasses cookie, they aren't as sweet and still have tons of flavor from the spices.

As for biscotti, I also found homemade biscotti to be "tooth breakingly hard". I now use the King Arthur Flour recipe for "American Style Biscotti". It's not authentic, of course, but it's crunchy without being rock hard, and it's not too sweet and has something like 6 tablespoons of butter, so relatively low in the fact content.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/american-style-vanilla-biscotti-recipe

Annie

Melissa, yes, I'm in Oly WA. Wish I could say I lived in Northern Italy for 10 years, lucky you!

I feel like a basic sugar cookie recipe might fit the bill here. You can certainly substitute oil for part of the butter, for a crisper result. Since these are meant to be frosted, they are firm & not too sweet :

Christmas Sugar Cookies from "Cooking For Christmas", 1950

1/2 c. butter

3/4 c. sugar

1 egg, slightly beaten

2 Tbs. milk

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. baking powder

2 1/2 c. sifted flour

Cream butter, add sugar.Blend well.

add egg, milk & vanilla.Beat vigorously for for a few moments.

Blend 2 c. flour & baking powder.Add to creamed mixture & mix well.

Add just enough remaining flour to achieve a stiff dough.Too much flour makes the cookies tough.

Wrap dough in wax paper & store in refrigerator overnight.

Roll out to 1/8".Use 1/2-1/3 of dough @ a time.Cut shapes & place on parchment covered cookie sheets.

Bake 8 minutes @ 375F.

For cookies that are to be hung on the tree, make a small hole near the top of unbaked cooky & insert a pea bean to keep hole from closing.

You might like Sand Tarts.

Thin cookie. Used a lot a Christmas, cut out in shapes, but a local favorite, lots of Germans here, so bakeries make them all year and just uses seasonal shapes.

As usual, there is quite a variation in the recipes, but they all seem to make a good cookie! Some use 4 cups of flour and must make 200 cookies!

This recipe seems to use a reasonable amount of ingredients. And they can be cut into circles, or squares or whatever and decorated with sugar, or whatever. It's not as complicated as it seems.

You can Google Sand Tarts or Pennsylvania Dutch Sand Tarts or German Sand Tarts and find a recipe that works for you

We usually use colored sugar sprinkles. Rarely nuts.

Sand Tarts: makes 70 to 85 cookies

• 1/2 cup/ 4 oz farm fresh unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup super fine sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 large organic egg, well beaten
• 1 3/4 cups/8 ½ oz pastry flour, twice sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 good pinch fine sea salt

For topping:

• 2 egg whites well beaten
• 1/2 cup coarsely broken nuts; walnuts, pecans, or almonds
• 1 tablespoon super fine sugar
• 1 tablespoon fresh ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Combine the sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg and set aside for dusting the cookies before baking.

Cream the butter and sugar together by hand in a large mixing bowl until fluffy. Add the vanilla and the beaten egg and whip everything together until well combined.

In a separate bowl twice sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together.

Begin adding quarter cups of the sifted ingredients to the butter mixture and mix in by hand until combined. As you add the sifted ingredients the dough will begin to come together and once all added the dough should easily pull away from the sides of the mixing bowl and bind together. At this point use your hands to form the dough into a ball.

Remove the dough from the bowl and place on a work surface. Divide the dough into three equal pieces and place on large squares of plastic film. Flatten the dough into discs about 1/4 inch in thickness. Wrap the film around the dough tightly and place the dough in the fridge and chill for at least twelve hours or overnight!

Remove a round of the dough from the fridge and roll out on a very lightly flour dusted pastry cloth or silicone pasty mat. Work as quickly as you can and roll the dough as thinly as possible. When you begin to see through the dough you are nearly there.

Unless you are working in a very cool kitchen I would suggest re-refrigerating the rolled out dough on the mat until it is firm for cutting out the cookies.

Continue rolling out the remaining dough and chilling before you begin cutting out cookies.

Preheat the oven to 325F/165C Place an oven thermometer in the oven. Have several baking sheets ready and lined with parchment or Silpat mat.

Remove a mat of chilled rolled out dough from the refrigerator and begin cutting out the cookies with as little waste as possible between each cut cookie. Remove scraps of dough around the cookies and carefully lift the cut cookies onto a baking sheet. Reserve the scraps and set aside, combining all scraps for a final rolling out of dough, although the re-rolled dough will not be as fine, but worth doing as motivation for your busy helpers!

Brush the tops of the cookies with the egg whites and stick broken nuts in the center of each cookie followed by a dusting of cinnamon nutmeg sugar.

Check the oven temperature on the oven thermometer before baking! Temperature and timing are of the essence for these delicate cookies!

Pop the cookies in the oven and bake for 6-8 minutes. The cookies should only faintly begin to color when done. Remove from the oven and rest on the tray for a minute or two to allow the cookie to firm up a little bit before transferring the cookies to a cooling rack.

Once the cookies are completely cool you can transfer them to tins or other air tight containers. The cookies will remain fresh for several weeks kept in a cool place, without refrigeration!

Melissa, I think you could easily add some nuts without compromising the biscotti recipe. I tend to play fast and loose with recipes anyway, I figure how bad can a cookie actually be? (grin) If they're too hard, I can always dunk them into my coffee! I'm a little more careful if I'm using a lot of expensive ingredients, but basic recipes not as much. I figure I can grind them up and make a pie crust or use the crumbs to top fruit or ice cream, there's always something I can do with a cookie!

Grandma never used anything but a sprinkle of nutmeg to top her sugar cookies and I still like that, but nuts are good too, as are the colored sugars, cinnamon and sugar mixtures, or a sprinkle of turbinado or coarse sugar.

Momj47, those look really good, that'd make a fine breakfast with a cup of hot coffee, mmmm.

Annie

Annie, I was thinking of substituting ground almonds for a portion, say 1/2 cup, of the flour. I agree I could add chopped nuts without it being a problem, but I want to get away from the biscotti type of cookie.

I checked sugar-flour proportions on these recipes against my biscotti recipe, whose level of sweetness I know, and they're all about the same as my biscotti: 1 to 3 (the sand tarts are sweeter). This is a little sweeter than what I want. I should say, I eat little food with added sugar or other sweetener in it and am quite sensitive to sweetness: a little goes a long way with me. So I was hoping for a less sweet cookie. It's true I could try just reducing amount of sugar, but I've had unfortunate results trying that with baking powder sweet breads: sugar seems to have a structural function in a lot of baked goods, and I don't know how to work with that.

I got started on this quest when I had some cookies called "ciambelline", which were somewhere between crisp and crumbly in texture--not hard, not chewy, not soft--and just slightly sweet, with some nice unobtrusive flavoring. That's what I want. I went looking for recipes, but, even setting aside those recipes for ciambelline that are our doughnuts, I didn't find anything that convinced me.

Carolb_w_fl and momj47, thanks for the recipes and for taking the trouble to post them, and annie1992 for the further input. I don't know if I'll ever find my perfect recipe, but your company is pleasant.

The company does tend to be pleasant here, doesn't it? And we all get to talk about cooking and baking, which is even more pleasant!

A mild cookie, slightly sweet? Something maybe like a homemade graham cracker? I've made them, also from King Arthur Flour. There's 1/4 cup of oil and 1/4 cup of sugar and some honey, very nice and kind of "cookie like", but not too crisp. I did find that the dough would get too hard and scorch if it is rolled too thinly, and it didn't take nearly as long to bake as the recipe said. I know all ovens are different but mine only took about 10 minutes. Maybe it's the honey that makes it prone to over baking so easily, but if they are carefully watched they are very nice. Plain AP flour can be used in place of the whole wheat, which makes them more "cookie like" and less graham cracker-ish.

Annie

What about an almond cookie?
Combine
2 1/2 cups ground almonds
2/3 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

In a separate bowl, Whip together
3 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon Vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Almond extract

Fold the wet and dry ingredients together, Roll mixture into small balls (I just use small cookie scoop) and flatten the top. As an option, I sometimes add an almond or chunk of dark chocolate to the top of each. Bake at 300F for 24 minutes.

those look really good, that'd make a fine breakfast with a cup of hot coffee, mmmm.

And an afternoon snack with a cup of tea.

We always seem to have these cookies around. My DD's favorite.

Here is my recipe for Lace Cookies. It was given to me by a friend who grew up in New Orleans - their live-in cook always made them. My friend has now died so I don't think she'd mind me sharing the recipe.

2 cups Old Fashioned Quaker oats (not Quick or Instant!)

2 cups white sugar

1 Tbl flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 sticks unsalted butter - melted

2 eggs - beaten

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 325°

Mix oats, flour, sugar and salt in bowl

Pour hot melted butter over mixture. Mix well

Add eggs and vanilla

Drop 1/2 tsp per cookie on cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil (the non-stick kind is a treat!)

Bake 10-12 min. Cook completely.

Peel foil from back of cookies.

Store in a tightly sealed tin box.

momj47, I try not to keep cookies around too much, as I'd just eat too many. I'd happily have them for breakfast and then again for afternoon tea. Maybe a couple for a bedtime snack too.

Yeah, so you see why I don't keep them around? (sigh)

Annie

I try not to keep cookies around too much, as I'd just eat too many.

And that's the problem with these cookies. They seem so harmless.

LOL

I made her take them out of the kitchen, they are in the kids TV room now.

Out of sight out of mind.

Lace cookies (some of you have seen this when I posted it before) !

Smiles,

Sooz

Sooz the lace cookies look delicious, you know with all the lace holes you can easily eat 3 to equil one cookie lol...or chase it with some diet coke which will cancel out the fat calories..ha

Thanks for the compliment! I think you're right, Mamapinky--eating air has to have negative calories, and that diet coke offsets everything else! LOL

How about homemade animal crackers? I had a hankering for them a while back & asked for a recipe. I was directed to the King Arthur website.

Will check out the suggested recipes. I spent some time on the King Arthur site and took note of the graham crackers, as it happens, and also of the animal crackers. One of the problems with baking in Italy is how many ingredients that are common in the U.S. can't be found here, at least not in the country: Milan or Florence might be a different story. Our local small supermarket is not currently carrying oatmeal (it was expensive anyway). Also unavailable: molasses, wheat germ, buttermilk, sour cream, buckwheat, rye, hard wheat flours (buckwheat flour used to be available, but not lately), dried currants and cherries, pecans, cranberries fresh or dried. Water pack pie cherries, though there's an abandoned orchard down the road. Pumpkin pack, though we get a fine substitute by roasting winter squash. Reliable dried yeast: I only use fresh now. Walnuts are very expensive. Vanilla and almond extract come in miniscule individual vials: my last trip to the U.S. I brought back bottles of both. We still eat well, but I really had to revise a lot of my cooking, and baking in particular. Also I'm a healthy cook, and getting older, both of which have caused changes in my cooking. We have good produce here, and the cheeses are sublime, though mostly I limit myself to a bit of Parmesan.

I keep thinking a basic shortbread would fit the bill, but you said not too much fat. FWIW, I often substitute oil (esp. olive) for shortening in baking recipes, since it's basically the same thing.

And what about a semolina cookie? Is semolina (pasta) flour available? These recipes look promising - & one could easily leave out the spice or sub a small amount of nutmeg - which I find enhances butter flavor.

http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/517009/semolina-biscuits

http://www.naivecookcooks.com/semolina-cardamom-cookies/

& online ordering may be the answer to your supply restrictions.