Hamantaschen

Today is Purim. Heard of it? It’s awesome. Purim is a holiday full of festivities, costumes, gifts, and general good cheer. The Purim story has scandal, manipulation, one really evil fella, a righteous dude, a cool queen, and plenty of intrigue.

That evil dude is named Haman and we hate him so much, when reading the Purim story we scream and stomp and bang to drown his name out. We also make cookies in reference of him. Hamantaschen are triangular cookies traditionally filled with poppy seeds or prune filling, but these days we also include our variety of jams, jellies, and other sweet fillings.

I whipped up a batch of these the other day in about an hour. But I forgot about the proper folding method for this specific recipe which led to some less than attractive cookies. So I raided some pictures from last year’s batch of cookies to show the proper way to make a pretty, and triangular, cookie.

Hamantaschen

adapted from Smitten Kitchen

• 8 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened
• 3 oz cream cheese at room temperature 3 Tbsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp orange zest
• 1 1/3 cups plus 4 tsp flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• jams, poppy seed filling, etc

Cream the butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Then add the sugar and beat for another minute. Add the egg, vanilla, orange zest, and salt and mix until well combined. Then add the flour until incorporated. The dough will still be a bit sticky.

Form the dough into a large disc, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm. Since I was short on time, I stuck my dough in the freezer for about 20 minutes.

After the dough has firmed up, roll it out on a well floured surface to about 1/4″ thick. Cut out circles. As you can see, I used an IKEA cup, which I think is about 2″ in diameter.

Spoon about a teaspoon of filling into to the center of the circles. Poppy seed filling is my favorite, but I also used raspberry preserves, and blackberry preserves. Apricot preserves are another popular filling.

To make them triangular shaped, fold up the dough on three sides and squish the dough together. As you can see in the picture above, I simply pinched the corners. This led to a big batch of cookie rounds with hot jam oozing out. My hamantaschen did not stay together. I realized I did not have this problem last year, so going back to my older pictures, I discovered my previous, and successful, folding method.

As you can see, I folded each third up and layered it down over the other sides at each corner. This horizontal squishing method seemed to work a lot better than my pinching method of this year. Live and learn I suppose (although, apparently live, learn, and remember is what I needed to do).

Bake them for 18-20 minutes in a 350º oven. Makes about 20-22 cookies. Yum!