“Orange” you glad we made hamentashen?

Happy Shushan Purim to all!

B”H we were privileged to enjoy a truly wonderful and joyous Purim, which culminated in a thrilling and boisterous game of Purim Pictionary at the seudah. (The clues ranged from “כן תהיה לנו” to “בגתן ותרש” to “מס על כל הארץ”.)

Several Purim-related notes:

1) Mishlo’ach Manot:

We rely on our local fundraising Mishlo’ach Manot Project to satisfy most of our social obligations and bake a few chocolate cakes to take care of our halachic ones:

The biggest cake is for an upcoming birthday party, not for Mishlo’ach Manot.

Each bag gets a cake, a carton of juice, and a sprinkling of candies for color:

2) Hamentashen:

Growing up, hamentashen were always made out of yeast dough and filled with mohn (poppy seed filling – i.e. pereg for the Hebraically-oriented among you).

But somewhere along the line, I discovered that I prefer cookie dough hamentashen filled with copious amounts of chocolate chips – as do YZG and the kids.

Since our traditional cookie dough recipe calls for margarine, I was on the look-out for an oil-based version. Fortunately, someone on the Israel-Food list posted a link to this intriguing hamentashen recipe, which calls for a whole orange – yes, peel included!

Our Baker-in-Chief (aka the Resident Ulpanistit) made two changes to the original recipe:

• She used extra flour to make the dough less sticky and thus easier to work with.
• She added a bit more sugar to account for the extra flour.
• She also added about a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Here’s the final product:

If you look carefully, you can see the orange flecks.

And the taste?

Admittedly, the orange flavor is surprising at first, but the majority of the Shiputzim family agreed that the orange complements the chocolate chips. In fact, the general consensus seems to be that we should repeat this experiment next year IY”H.

And now excuse me while I go figure out new ways to procrastinate Pesach cleaning…