![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today is Laundry Day
Mar. 22nd, 2005 04:53 pm. . . so I'm baking.
Okay, I'm ALSO doing laundry. Because Tuesday is the day I do laundry. But Purim is Thursday, so I've been making hamentashen.
I'm making yeast-raised hamentashen instead of cookie-dough style, and they're coming out fabulously. They're poppyseed.
See, the thing about poppyseed filling is that poppyseeds don't actually taste like much. So when you make poppyseed filling, you have to add things to the filling to make it taste good.
Things like sugar, and honey, and lemon juice, and lemon zest, and ground pecans, and ground walnuts, and ground rasins, and whiskey. Rye whiskey to be precise.
The neat thing is that you combine all these things in a saucepan, over medium heat. The rye ignited. It was SOOOOO NIFTY!! Big blue flames coming out of the pot.
The poppyseeds are soaked in boiling water for three hours or so so that they turn into a kind of silty sandy mud. And everything, plus the merengued white of an egg, are all mixed together.
I discovered that rolling out the dough and then cutting circles out of it doesn't work so well. Instead, I started taking handful-sized balls of dough and rolling them into approximate circles, and filling them. Since one folds the hamentashen over into triangles anyway, actually starting with good circles isn't really THAT necessary.
I'm doing better at closing them this year. Last year, the vast majority of my hamentashen opened up during baking, leaving little round cookies with piles of poppyseed filling on them. They tasted fine, but they looked more like caviar rounds than hamentashen. . .
Okay, I'm ALSO doing laundry. Because Tuesday is the day I do laundry. But Purim is Thursday, so I've been making hamentashen.
I'm making yeast-raised hamentashen instead of cookie-dough style, and they're coming out fabulously. They're poppyseed.
See, the thing about poppyseed filling is that poppyseeds don't actually taste like much. So when you make poppyseed filling, you have to add things to the filling to make it taste good.
Things like sugar, and honey, and lemon juice, and lemon zest, and ground pecans, and ground walnuts, and ground rasins, and whiskey. Rye whiskey to be precise.
The neat thing is that you combine all these things in a saucepan, over medium heat. The rye ignited. It was SOOOOO NIFTY!! Big blue flames coming out of the pot.
The poppyseeds are soaked in boiling water for three hours or so so that they turn into a kind of silty sandy mud. And everything, plus the merengued white of an egg, are all mixed together.
I discovered that rolling out the dough and then cutting circles out of it doesn't work so well. Instead, I started taking handful-sized balls of dough and rolling them into approximate circles, and filling them. Since one folds the hamentashen over into triangles anyway, actually starting with good circles isn't really THAT necessary.
I'm doing better at closing them this year. Last year, the vast majority of my hamentashen opened up during baking, leaving little round cookies with piles of poppyseed filling on them. They tasted fine, but they looked more like caviar rounds than hamentashen. . .