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Home > posts > 2014 > 03 > 20140316_202658_hamentashen.html

Hamentashen

/posts/2014/03/20140316_202658_hamentashen.html

All of the final cookies[/caption]

Meredith and I made hamentashen to celebrate Purim.

The Dough

We used my dad's dough recipe^[@rev]except we used coconut oil instead of butter. We used the extra-virgin kind to still give it a coconut flavor. (We used the TJ's brand). Anyway, different websites suggest different ways to use it. Commenters of this Kitchn Postsay to use 1:1 for volume. This StackExchange post says that butter is 80% fat whereas coconut oil is 100% so compensate accordingly.Coconut Oil Onlinesays it is roughly 92% by weight of butter. I went with the latter since it seemed like a good mix. It follows The Kitchn's volume advice and is easy to do by weight. Two sticks of butter is 1/2 lbs ~= 227 grams so I used 209 grams.

We refrigerated it first to make sure it was solid (melts at 76F). I then creamed it as the recipe said. I was afraid of it getting too warm and melting so I stopped a bit early. This was a mistake as I found a few (some rather large) chunks of coconut oil in the dough when I was rolling it out. It was still very good so clearly either the dough was forgiving or it was the right amount of fat.

As per the suggestion on the page, I chilled the dough after it was made (about an hour). I do nothave anyexperience with the original butter version but this was really, really hard to work with when that cold. It would crack and be hard to spread. I found thatthe second rolling where it was warmer was easier so I took the rest of the fridge. That helped a lot.

The dough held up very well. As you can see from the various photos, most heldtheir shape well. It had a good crumb and almost reminded me of short-bread. Plus, you could really taste the coconut flavor which I_really_ liked!

On the note of the dough, Ifound 18 minutes was the right amount of time to bake them!

2014-03-18 Note: I had a few later and they were cold from being outside. The coconut flavor_really_ showed through when they were cold!

Fillings

We made quite an assortment of fillings as noted below. We did run out so we resorted to some no-sugar-added cherry pie filling. However, that wasn't very good so we eventually stopped and just made cookies.

The other fillings are noted below

Fig Almond Cardamom:

Took a large handful of blanched almonds and a bit of cardamom. I used the magic bullet to finely chop it and then I mixed in a large dollup of Trader Joes Fig Butter. I may have used a_bit_ too much cardamom but the filling was very good. This was my favorite!

Mango Coconut Pecan:

Similar to the above but with pecans and coconut flakes finely chopped. I then mixed in Trader Joe's Mango Butter. A bit on the sweet side but it held up well and was different

Homemade Blackberry Lavender Filling:

This was Meredith's creation. First, she used the blender to combine about a 1/2 tsp of dried lavender buds with 1 tbsp sugar. She then cook 2 small (1/2 pint I think) containers of berries on the stove with 2 Tbsp water. As it cooked down she added 2 more Tbsp sugar. Towards the end , she mixed 1 Tbsp corn starch with the lavender sugar and added that. There wasn't enough lavender flavor so we crushed another 1/2 tsp of lavender and added it. The lavender flavor didn't come through as much until it cooled but then you could really taste it.

I was worried itwouldn't be thick enough to hold up but I was wrong. It worked out really well and was a nice (new) filing. We will make this again and use it for other things!

Toasted Black Sesame Seed Paste:

Meredith had this idea before I had read that halvawas sometimes used as filling. We 3 Tbsp toasted black sesame seeds (not an easy thing to dobecause you cannot tell when toasted by looking at them) and then we ground them in the Magic Bullet until the releasedtheir oils and became like a paste. Then we added 2 Tbsp of honey and blended.

This worked out well even though it looked like tar filling. Unfortunately, there wasn't much. We only got 4 cookies out of it. We'll use more next time. It really did have the taste of Sesame Halva though!

Heath and Sweetened Coconut Flakes:

I had these leftover from a while ago and I managed to not eat them (I put a sign on them that says "NO" so I don't!). I finned a few with either a mixture of the two, just health, or with heath on the others. Theydidn't really work. You can see in some photos that they drooped. I did use them to top the cookies at the end.

Future Ideas:

The fruit butters plus nuts really worked well. I would expand that with others. Maybe pumpkin butter! Or apple butter. Also, maple bacon filling would be interesting but probably sacrilege

Other Notes:

Some general notes we figured:

• Using a bit of water around the rim of the cookie makes pinching easier

• They didn't spread out very much. Could be the different fat vs the recipe

• No-Sugar-Added pie filling is not very good.

• Make more filling. It made a lot of cookies (forgot to count. Oops)

• Flour on everything helps spread

• Don't make obnoxious remarks to Meredithbecause you get flour thrown in your beard (see photo)

• As noted already, make sure the coconut oil is well creamed with the butter!

Photos:

Below are a bunch of photos:

Photo listing built from WP gallery shortlink

The dough all finished:

Blackberry Jam in process:

Blackberry jam finished:

Mango-Almond filling:

Heath and Coconut filling with a note to not just eat it:

Toasted Black Sesame Filling:

Rolling out the dough:

Meredith building the hamentashen:

I made some snarky comment and got floured:

Building the Hamentashen:

First tray out of the oes:

A Jam filled one:

Fig-Pecan-Coconut (not the same coconut as the other photo):

The sesame filling expanded and hardened:

Backup cherry topping we used. Not very good. Will not do so again!:

Pain cookies we made with some remaining dough:

Original WP Post ID: 7623

Original WP Pub Date: 2014-03-16_202658