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.