First Post - with Hamentashen!

Hi, and welcome to my baking blog! Hopefully this won't be too full of failures, but we'll just see about that. ;)

The Jewish holiday Purim is right around the corner, and my family always goes all out with baking yummy treats for the mishloach manot - packages of food you send to your friends and family. It's like Halloween, only not pagan. =P

Anyway, hamentashen are basically a necessity for the mishloach manot. They have a significance to the story of Purim, and they're yummy, too! Yay for yummy things!

This recipe is from my (and my siblings') preschool teacher, and we've been using it since before I was born. It's pretty simple, even for a neobaker!

My mom and I made chocolate, prune, and apricot fillings.

Hamentashen Dough
1/2 cup margarine
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup [vegetable] oil
2 tsp. vanilla
2 tsp. baking powder
5 1/8 cups flour
2 eggs, beaten - for the glaze

 

This was after the vanilla was added.

Chocolate Filling (this is actually my own recipe, majorly adapted from one I found in an old cookbook)
4 oz. cream cheese (I used non-dairy)
3 tsp. cocoa powder
Half an egg (I used egg substitute, so it was 1/8 cup of that)
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup chocolate chips, melted

Apricot Filling
12 oz. apricot butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/8-1/4 cup chopped walnuts

*I don't have a real recipe for the prune filling, sorry! My mom just adds prunes and raisins together and that's all I know.*

Beat the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy. Mix in the eggs, then the orange juice, then the oil, and finally the vanilla. Add in the baking powder and flour slowly, cup by cup until a nice dough has formed. If it's not ready to be rolled out yet (mine wasn't), refrigerate for about an hour. While the dough is being solidified, make the fillings.

Mix together the ingredients for the fillings separately and set them aside.

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface. Cut out 2-3 inch circles from the dough with the rims of cups (or anything else that will cut it neatly). Spoon enough filling onto each circle - about 1 tsp. Fold up 3 sides to form a triangle, making sure that filling shows through in the middle.

Place on a tray covered with aluminum foil, brush with the glaze, and bake for 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees, or until golden brown, but before the filling boils over. Cool and enjoy!

 

Before baking...

After baking!

Tomorrow I have another snow day, so I believe I'll be making chocolate chip cookies or something else of that sort.