At this point, you may be asking what the point of this lovely anecdote is, and you would be right to ask. And so I will tell you. More than 100 Hershey kisses come in a bag, and so happily, there were about 26 kisses left in the house after everyone left for school. Some for me, some for the girls. And these kisses kept my two year old busy while I made the first batch of hamentaschen dough of the season.
There have been many years when I did not make hamentaschen. They are not that easy to make and I have failed time and again. I have pulled many trays out of the oven with high hopes, only to be let down when all the filling has once again fallen out of the pinched triangles of dough.
And then one Purim we tasted my friend Alissa's hamentaschen, and not only were they very very good, but they were very very pretty. And since then, we have been making Alissa's hamentaschen - and I am so happy to share this very easy to make recipe with you. She, and by extension, I, don't really know where the original recipe came from, so for everyone's sake, we will just call them Super Alissa's Hamentaschen.
Here we go:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup margarine
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons lemon juice*
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest*
Jar of jam
So once the dough is rolled out, use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles - I didn't have a cookie cutter handy so I used one of those colored plastic Ikea cups from the kids' department. It's probably a little less than 3 inches wide. I dipped it in flour and it worked just fine as a cookie cutter.
The original recipe calls for a 4 and 1/2 inch cookie cutter, which I think is huge - and says that the recipe will yield ten cookies. I used the slightly smaller circle and I got 2 dozen, maybe even a few more, out of the recipe.
Using a teaspoon, place between a half and 3/4 of a teaspoon full of jam or jelly (we used apricot cause that's what we had in the fridge) in the center of each circle.
*I did not have lemon juice in the house and I certainly did not have any lemon zest, so I skipped the zest altogether and used orange juice instead of lemon and they came out quite tasty.