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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

“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:

IMG_4666 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:

IMG_4683

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:

IMG_4675

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…

11 comments:

  1. Now why did you have to go and ruin such a nice post with the words "Pesach cleaning"?!

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  2. "The biggest cake is for an upcoming birthday party, not for Mishlo’ach Manot."
    THAT is a real birthday cake!!!

    BTW - there are 97 labels. 3 more to go!

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  3. SuperRaizy - Sorry about that. The thing is that I'm hoping that if I *blog* about cleaning, the *actual* cleaning will somehow take care of itself...
    :-)

    MAG - Nice use of an HTML tag!

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  4. If you would like to try another oil based recipe without the orange, I have my grandmothers recipe which we made and enjoyed!!

    RCT

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  5. RCT - Thanks. What do you use for filling?

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  6. since IST and ABT were the reason we made them, they chose chocolate chips. the chips didnt melt like i thought they would so while the were hot we smushed them with a spoon.
    they were quite good.

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  7. RCT - Here in TRLEOOB (the real life equivalent of our blog), we leave the chocolate chips whole, as nature intended...
    :-)

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  8. very cool I see the orange peels. I wouldn't be so brave to try it.

    It's cool though cause I also made it with chocolate chips! Mine remained in chocolate chip form, so I probably didn't do it the right way.

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  9. JS of B - We actually like that the chocolate chips hold their form, but as you can see in RCT's comment above, she used a spoon to "mash" them...

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  10. Mrs. S: o, cool, so it can work either way then. But next time I know I can try mashing them, although maybe it does look good when they hold their form.

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  11. JS of B - I guess it's really just a matter of taste...

    Word verification: bless

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