This recipe was inspired by my son, who at 18 months has become obsessed with the hamentaschen illustration in Amy Wilson Sanger's cute primer on Jewish food, Let's Nosh. Every time we get to the page about hamentaschen, he points to the one with black filling and signs "berries," very excitedly. (Don't tell him but I think it's actually supposed to be a poppyseed filling.) Since Purim time is just about here, I did my best to oblige him with some of his own real, live berry hamentaschen.
I'm too much of a cheapskate/aspiring locavore to keep fresh blueberries on hand in February, so I made do with some frozen wild blueberries that I have stocked up in the freezer (as you may guess from the above story, blueberries are another of the kiddo's obsessions).
Here are some of my hamentaschen tips gleaned from years of baking them with preschoolers:
- Don't be tempted to overfill them. A little filling goes a long way and if you put in too much the cookies will unfold and they won't look anything like pockets/ears/tricorner hats/the purim legend of your choice.
- When you fold the pastry over, pinch them almost all the way shut, so you can barely see any filling at all. When they bake they will expand and the filling with peek out the middle.
- It
is possible, in the case of allergies, to make hamentaschen that are
gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, and citrus-free. But they will take
forever to bake and taste like some kind of weird Japanese pastry.
Ingredients:
for the cookie dough:
8 oz cream cheese
1 stick of butter, softened
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
zest of one lemon
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
for the filling:
1/4 cup white sugar
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
pinch of salt
1-1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
Instructions:
In a large bowl, cream together the butter, cream cheese, and 1/2 cup sugar, then add the egg and lemon zest.
In a small bowl, mix together the flour and baking powder, then slowly
add to the other ingredients and mix well. Refrigerate the dough for 1
hour.
Put the 1/4 cup sugar, cornstarch and salt in a small saucepan on the stove over medium high heat and add 1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon of water. Add the blueberries and mix well, continuing to stir occasionally until mixture boils and thickens. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice. Transfer to a bowl and refrigerate until cool.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
When
dough is ready, flour your work surface and roll out the dough to about
1/4" thick. You can do this in small batches if you like. Using a
large cookie cutter or a drinking glass, cut out the dough into large
circles and place them on the parchment paper-lined cookie sheets.
Spoon 1 teaspoon of filling onto the center of each circle. With a bit
of water on your fingertip, wet the three spots on the circle that will
be the corners of your triangle, and then pinch each corner closed,
working in toward the center until only a tiny bit of filling is
visible.
Bake 15-18 minutes, one cookie sheet-full at a time, until pale golden brown.
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