Today for Purim, I made hamentaschen. How would I grade the taste? A solid “A.” Texture? “B-.” (I could have rolled the dough thinner.) Fun making the recipe? Also an “A,” maybe an “A+” because I enjoy working with dough.
But the shape? “See me after class.”
See, they’re supposed to be tri-cornered, like the hat of Purim’s villain, Haman, but mine resemble jelly-babies snug in miniature cradle boards. And the cookies that didn’t have tightly pinched corners came undone during baking and resembled large open sores. I, of German heritage, felt I’d defiled a sacred Jewish ritual and that when I next peeked in the oven to check on the prune butter-filled variety I baked following a batch of raspberry, a bolt of pure YHWH would shoot out and punch a hole through my chest just like it did to the Nazis who opened the ark in Raiders.
I don’t know what about “form circle of dough into a triangle” I didn’t understand. This hearkens back to my challenges with spatial relations. Remember those standardized tests you’d take in grade school with a sharp #2 pencil and on the last page there was always that mind-twister with an unfolded paper dodecahedron that had different patterns on each segment and you had to imagine what it looked like assembled, rotated 120 degrees and viewed in a mirror? I was never good at that and grumbled about what use it was in real life. Well, it’s useful for hamentascnen making.
Hamantaschen
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 sticks butter, softened
- 2 eggs
- 1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1/2 cup orange juice
- the grated peel of 1/2 orange
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3 cups flour
- assorted jams for filling (I used raspberry jam and prune butter)
- Cream the sugar and butter together until fluffy. Add the eggs, vanilla, orange juice and peel. Beat well. Add dry ingredients about a 1/3 at a time, beating well after each addition. The dough will be sticky; chilling it in the freezer for a bit before rolling helps.
- Roll out the dough to about 1/8"-1/4" thick. Use a glass or cookie cutter (approximately 3" diameter) to cut circles out of the rolled dough.
- Place 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of filling in center of each circle.
- Form a triangle by crimping the dough into ridges, like these or use the fold-and-pinch method shown here. Either way, pinch and crimp tightly to avoid filling leaks.
- Bake on a tinfoiled and/or greased cookie sheet at 350° for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Yield about two dozen cookies.