Hamantaschen

It's Purim time! Which means it's time for hamantaschen! Seriously, you have to love a holiday that has a cookie as it's featured food (find some interesting commentary on what hamantaschen are here). Of course, Martha Stewart is too goyische to include a hamantaschen recipe in her Cookies cookbook, but she does have a recipe on her website. So, in the spirit of this blog project, I baked her recipe rather than a more traditional one.

Obviously, Martha can't do anything the simple way, so her recipe is fairly time-consuming and involves refrigerating the dough throughout the baking process. She also includes a recipe for making your own poppyseed filling, but since this is not one of the "official" cookbook recipes, I eschewed that in favor of storebought dessert fillings.

One of most obvious differences between Martha's recipe and the more traditional ones is the inclusion of orange zest and freshly squeezed orange juice in the dough. You can definitely taste it and the orange adds a citrusy zing without being overpowering. I'm sure you could omit it without any ill effects if you so chose.

I filled my hamantaschen with poppyseed, apple, cherry, chocolate chip, white chocolate chip and spiced gingerbread butter. The poppyseed and fruit fillings were Baker products (easily located in the baking section of your grocery store) and their thick consistency held up well. One year, my husband tried using jam to fill the hamantaschen with poor results because of their high water content.

Unfortunately, the chocolate chip fillings were less successful. For whatever reason, the sides of the hamantaschen triangle collapsed and they just looked like blobs. Tasty blobs, but blobs nonetheless.

The recipe suggested that it will yield 60 cookies but I got closer to 35-40 cookies out of it.

Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels

My husband asked me to slow down with the cookie-making because we have had way too many sweets in the house, so it has been a few days since my last batch of cookies. I thought it was time to break out the baking gear, though and picked a doozie for today!

Martha's recipe for Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels (page 61) is extremely labor-intensive, but as you can see from the picture, produces beautiful, impressive-looking cookies. While the recipe is certainly time-consuming, none of the tasks are difficult. This is a wonderful cookie for a party or a baby shower.

In her cookbook, Martha recommends using a fluted cookie cutter and pastry wheel, but since I don't own those tools, I simply used a square cookie cutter and a sharp knife and I still thought the cookies looked gorgeous.

Coconut is only used in the filling and is not an overpowering flavor in these cookies. In fact, if you don't like coconut, you could easily omit it and still have a delicious cookie. The amount of filling is well more than enough for the recipe - in fact, you could halve the amount and still have enough.

I used a baby spoon for doling out the filling and the jams and that worked beautifully. I used both strawberry and raspberry jams, but found that the raspberry was a better choice because it had more substance while the strawberry jam ran a little (but still tasted yummy!).

Chocolate Cookie Cutouts

We have been snowed in for the past few days, so what better activity to do with the kids than bake cookies!? Of course, Valentine's Day is upon us so I wanted to make something heart-shaped. I tried out Martha's Chocolate Cookie Cutouts (page 239) recipe.

I made the dough last night, and refrigerated it overnight. When I took it out of the refrigerator to roll out this morning, it was fairly hard. But with some muscle power, I was able to roll it out thinly onto the parchment paper. I also got to use my new kiddie cookie cutter from Sur La Table. I had to press the nonpareils into the cookies to get them to stay put.

I was so impressed with the cookies when they came out of the oven! In the past, when I have made cutout cookies, the shapes have oozed and turned into giant glops that in no way resemble the intended shapes. These were perfect hearts! They were beautiful and tasted yummy too. They weren't too sweet (my husband suggested they would be delicious made into a sandwich cookie with icing in between). This recipe was in the "crispy & crunchy" section of the cookbook, but the cookies were soft and delicate when I made them.

Since it's Valentine's Day, I wanted to make more heart cookies, especially since one of my daughters is not a huge fan of chocolate. I also wanted to try out my new Kuhn Rikon cookie press. I bought it to use with one of the Martha recipes, but I haven't been able to find a key ingredient so today, I just used the recipe in the booklet that came with the press.

The press came with 14 different disks that shape the cookies, including hearts, flowers and of course, pumpkins and bats, among others. It took only a minute to figure out how to assemble it and insert the dough, and soon enough, I had perfect little hearts! They were fairly small, so I could fit LOTS of them on one cookie sheet. I can't wait to try out all the other shapes!

Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

The Cigarettes Russes were very popular and almost gone, so I made another batch of cookies tonight. We are buried under a ton of snow here in Columbus, OH, so I wasn't able to run out to get any special ingredients and I just wanted to make some comfort food. The recipe I chose was Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies (page 170), from the "crunchy & nutty" section of Martha's cookbook.

These cookies were extremely easy to make. Since I didn't have whole wheat flour, I simply used all-purpose flour for all the required flour. I substituted semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of chopping up chocolate into chunks (so this should probably be called Banana Walnut Chocolate Chip cookies in this case). As Martha says in her little intro to this recipe, these cookies combine "two bakery classics" - they are a delicious blend of banana bread and chocolate chip cookies. Yum!

My husband has been complaining that I like my cookies too crispy, so the texture of these were perfect for him, a little cakey and nice and soft.

Everyone enjoyed them - these are my kids and my brother-in-law noshing on the cookies after dinner.

Cigarettes Russes

I decided to get a little fancy in my cookie-making today. I tried out Martha's recipe for Cigarettes Russes (page 30). These are the wafer-like tube-shaped cookies that are often paired with ice cream and either filled with or dipped in chocolate.

The batter was fairly easy to make. It called for powdered sugar, flour and salt to be sifted together. Then, in a well in the center (pictured), combine melted butter, egg whites, cream and vanilla. Although the recipe didn't mention an electric mixer, I used the whisk attachment on my KitchenAid and it was a fairly painless process. The batter was pretty runny, but in accordance with the directions, it was refrigerated for several hours (in this case, it was in the fridge for about 8 hours).

I almost forgot about the cookies though, until my husband saw the dough in the downstairs refrigerator and reminded me. The most labor-intensive process is baking and forming the cookies, but it wasn't difficult and I found it fun. You have to spread the batter onto the cookie sheets VERY THINLY (I don't think I ever got it thin enough). In fact, I think the batter should almost be translucent when you have spread it out. My cookies were more like cigars rather than cigarettes because the batter wasn't spread thin enough.

I only fit about 3 cookies on each cookie sheet because of how large the cookies get when you spread out the batter. They cook for a very short period of time - 6 minutes.

As soon as the cookies are removed from the oven, you quickly remove them with your handy offset spatula and wrap them around a dowel (or in my case, a chopstick). I realized by the end of this process, however, that I could have just rolled them up. After you let them cook, dip them in melted chocolate and/or nuts. This recipe calls for bittersweet chocolate; I thought that would be too harsh, so I used half bittersweet and half semi-sweet, but my husband and I both thought it was still quite bitter.

The cookies are "light and delicious" - as per the section of the cookbook into which they fall. They are a little spongy, quite sweet, and crunchy on the edges. Delightful!