Hamentaschen

My first experience of hamentaschen (say it "HA-men-TA-shen") came courtesy of my friend Nechama. Nechama has blue, pixie-style hair, fifteen piercings at last count, eight tattoos, and travels to India yearly to meet with the gurus of Anusara yoga, which she teaches back here in the States. She is the only woman I know who can honestly say she's been lost in a monsoon in the jungles of India. She is also Jewish, which is how she came to be serving me hamentaschen during a Purim party a few years ago.

Even though I'll always associate hamentaschen with Nechama's stories about her crazy travels, the rest of the world knows this little cookie as a traditional part of one of the most beloved Jewish holidays. Purim is a fabulous holiday, in which Jews are required (required, do you hear?) to eat, drink, and be merry. In fact, according to the Talmud, a person is commanded to drink until he cannot tell the difference between "Blessed be Mordecai" and "Cursed be Haman". My kind of holiday!

The villain of the Purim story is Haman, who was a greedy advisor to an ancient king, and who tried to have all the Jews killed way back when. This cookie takes it's name from the Hebrew for 'Haman's pockets', and supposedly the triangle shape represents Haman's three-cornered advisor hat. Much like greedy Haman in the stories, this cookie gets it's 'pocket' stuffed with something sweet: I prefer apple butter or strawberry preserves, but I've heard of people using anything from fig jellies to cherry pie filling (I think that'd be too sweet, but to each his own). Fun to make and with a fantastic history, hamentaschen are the kind of cookie I like to make year-round. They go great with a cup of hot tea for a late-night snack. I use whole wheat flour, and the dough turns out a little darker than in the photo above, so don't be alarmed if they don't look exactly the same.

Hamentaschen Cookies

2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/4 cup orange juice (get the kind with no pulp)
1 cup white flour
1 cup wheat flour (DO NOT substitute white flour! The wheat flour is necessary to achieve the right texture!)
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
A filling of some kind, be it apple butter (my fav) or some sort of jam or jelly

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer. Add the egg and beat until incorporated. Add the OJ and beat until mixed. At this point, you should have a very soupy butter mixture. Add the flour, 1/2 cup at a time, alternating white and wheat. Mix thoroughly between each. Add the baking powder and cinnamon with the last half cup of flour. The resulting dough should be fairly moist and sticky, and pretty dense. I always have to scrape it out of the beaters on my mixer, it tends to clump inside the beaters since it's so dense. Cover the batter and refrigerate overnight or for at least 4 hours.

Remove the dough from the fridge and grab the cookie trays you're using. I prefer a non-stick tray for this, since the dough is minimally easier to shape on this tray than on a normal tray. Flour the cookie sheet lightly, but don't skimp here. Again, the flour makes the shaping process easier. I find that flouring everything that's going to touch the dough is very important to making this cookie successfully, because the dough is very sticky, and pulls out of shape very easily if there's not a thin layer of flour to keep it from sticking. Scoop off a two-tablespoon hunk of dough (or a little bigger, you'll get a feel for size as you go), plop it on the cookie sheet, and use your floured fingers to press it into a 1/4 inch thick circle, about three or four inches in diameter. Dollop a generous teaspoon and a half of your filling of choice into the center of the circle. Using a floured silicone spatula, lift the edges of the dough off the tray and fold them towards the center. Do this three time, to form a triangle shape (refer to the picture above for an idea of how this is supposed to go, and what the final product should look like). Pinch the edges of the triangle to make sure that the 'flaps' of dough don't come unfolded during the baking process. Repeat to fill the cookie sheet; I can usually fit 6 cookies on one sheet.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Once the oven is at temperature, bake the cookies for 16-20 minutes. 20 min is perfect in my oven, and the goal is that the cookie should be a light, toasty brown, but the filling should not bubble over. Apple butter tends not to bubble over easily, but preserves are more prone to boiling just before the cookies get done. I've made these enough now that I time the cookies' doneness by the progress of the filling: when the strawberry preserves begin to bubble, but not bubble over, the cookies are done.

Servings: 15-20 cookies, depending on size.