No Tuesdays With Dorie, but Lovely Hamantaschen Instead!

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Lemon Cup Custard, chosen for us by Bridget of The Way the Cookie Crumbles. I didn’t make it. Today is Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated most significantly, at least for my family, with hamantaschen, and given that we made two batches on two different days, I decided to skip the custard. If you want to read about Lemon Cup Custard, visit the several hundred other TWD blogs, where you will no doubt see many lovely photos and read many vivid descriptions.

But if you want to read about hamantaschen, stay right here.

When I was young, I learned that hamantaschen were named for Haman’s hat, Haman being the awful nasty villain at the heart of the Purim story. Turns out that, as with so many other things we learn as children, that’s probably not true. And I always wondered why we were eating a bad guy’s hat anyway. But no matter why we eat hamantaschen, we do eat them. A lot of them.

Traditionally (meaning the ones I ate as a child, and the ones you see in bakeries today), hamantaschen are filled with cherry, prune, or poppyseed fillings. We are not traditional.

We’ve been refining our filling selections over the years since #1 Son was very young, and we’ve settled on some perennial favorites: Marshmallow Fluff and chocolate chips, almond pie filling and chocolate chips, cherry pie filling and chocolate chips …

Did you pick up on the common thread there?

We also use Nutella and pecans, plain cherry filling, almond butter and sweetened shredded coconut, and other things I’m forgetting right now.

On Friday #1 Son made a batch of dough, using a new recipe for us (because we couldn’t find the book with our regular recipe, but let’s not discuss that right now). He and his girlfriend and #2 Son and a friend of his made hamantaschen Friday afternoon. Fun was had. But the recipe didn’t make very many, and I didn’t get even one.

So Sunday night I made another batch, and this morning I baked them (with a little help from #2 Son, who made a turkey version).

First I rolled out the dough and cut it into circles; our regular recipe involves rolling the dough into logs and slicing (like World Peace Cookies!), then rolling out each individual circle.

Next I put a dollop of filling in the middle of each cookie.

I used lots of different fillings.

And then I folded them into adorable little three-cornered hat simulacra.

The dough was much drier than our usual. #1 Son had neglected to mention that, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I made do. They’re not the prettiest hamantaschen ever; some were prettier than others.

But they are absolutely delicious, as always, and I am very happy with them. And I am even happier that I made them in daylight, and so got some decent photos for a change.