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One of the areas I hope to continue expanding my cooking skills is Jewish cooking. Clearly Delicious has been host to klugel, challah, matzo ball soup, and a bevy of other recipes that I’ve grown to love. There’s something about the ingredients and traditions in Jewish cooking that I just can’t quite describe…maybe it’s the rich heritage that precedes every meal or the ritual of eating that is so important to the faith. Every recipe has a reason, why, and how, and you get a feel for the people just by thumbing through the history of their dishes.
With the upcoming holiday of Purim, a holiday that marks the Jewish people’s deliverance from the Persian empire (most notably marked by the villainous Haman), I want to share with readers a charming cookie recipe that I wish would cross over to every kind of baking tradition. Simple vanilla cookies dressed in flavorful preserves (or poppy seed paste) known as “Hamantaschen” makeup the holiday’s most popular baked good. Shaped in a three-pointed style (meant to represent Haman’s hat), these cookies offer a certain kind of agency to the eaters–symbolically eating the hat of your oppressor? Now this is a concept I can get behind!
Follow my (or should I say, Deb of Smitten Kitchen’s) recipe below for an introduction to this delicious cookie. Normally, I’d adapt the dish to my own preferences, but not being Jewish, I’ve decided to sit this occasion out so that I might accurately represent a culture’s baking practices. Thanks Deb, for the wonderful guidance.
Hamantaschen
This recipe is adapted from Deb at Smitten Kitchen where the original can be found here. The only change I’ve suggested is the creaming of butter and cream cheese in a chilled state (not softened or room temperature). One of the issues that arises when making this cookie is the dough’s structural integrity. I’ve found that a constantly stiff dough helps to prevent any flattening (thus, the chilled butter and cream cheese).
Ingredients:
*8 tablespoons butter, chilled
*3 ounces cream cheese, chilled
*1 egg
*1 teaspoon vanilla extract
*1/2 teaspoon orange zest
*1/4 teaspoon salt
*1 1/3 cups plus 4 teaspoons flour
*red and yellow preserves, for filling
1.) In a standing mixer, use paddle attachment to cream chilled butter and cream cheese until smooth. Mix in egg, vanilla, orange zest, salt, and flour. The dough should pull together like a moist sugar cookie dough, but if it appears “a tad sticky” (Deb’s phrasing), add another teaspoon of flour.
2.) Form dough into a disc and refrigerate for at least an hour, but up to overnight.
3.) When ready to cook the hamantaschen, preheat oven to 350F and flour a clean surface. Roll out cookie dough and cut cookies into the shapes of circular rounds based on your preference for desired size. Here, I used an overturned champagne glass, but any glass will do. Transfer cookies to a greased baking sheet and proceed to punch out all of the cookies.
4.) In the center of each cookie, place 1 teaspoon preserves making sure not to over-stuff the cookie.
5.) Shape cookies: pinch together three corners of your circular discs until they are shaped in the triangular hat-like shape of a hamantaschen cookie. Now, to prevent the cookie from “popping open” or becoming pancake-like while baking, take the pinched edges (which should be pinched together hard) and pull until they’re a little longer than you’d like, then curling the edge back towards the cookie and pressing it back into its originally pinched-edge form. This step may sound difficult (as it is a bit hard to describe), but will really help with your cookies keeping their shape in the oven. I think the biggest problem with shaped hamantaschen is that edges are simply pinched together. Really, they should be pinched and then slightly reconstructed so that the dough acts as one solid piece, not two pieces that have been joined.
6.) Place hamantaschen in oven and bake for 15 minutes or until brown. Remove from oven and cool. Enjoy! Makes 2 dozen cookies.
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