Speculoos Hamentaschen for Purim!
I hadn’t baked for almost a month because I came down with covid19. The good news is, I recovered, and I’m fine now. Feeling better happened to correspond to the time of Purim, so this was a perfect bake to get back into things.
Now in my mind, there is pretty much one best type of hamentaschen, and all the rest pale in comparison. Poppyseed, or mohn in Yiddish. These are what I make most years. This year I didn’t have a chance to go to the store and get the filling (see covid19+ above). So I got creative this year, I had a jar of Trader Joe’s speculoos in the cupboard, and I wondered if I could use that. Well, sure enough, I found a recipe over at myjewishlearning.com.
Speculoos Hamantaschen
Ingredients
- ½ cup unsalted butter
- ¾ cup granulated sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 Tbsp milk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
- ¼ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp salt
Instructions
Hamentaschen
- Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth in stand mixer with paddle attachement.Add egg, milk and vanilla until mixed thoroughly.
- Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl. Add dry mixture to wet mixture until incorporated.
- Chill dough for 2 hours
- Dust work surface with powdered sugar. Roll out dough to 1/4" thick (or your preference but I find thinner hard to work with).Cut out ~3inch circles, you can use a circular cutter, or I just used a tin can with both sides removed.
- Dab about a teaspoon if speculoos into the center of each circle.
- Eggwash the rest of the circle around the filling, this helps it stick together.
- Fold into triangles.
- Preheat oven to 400F while chilling the assembled hamentaschen in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
- Bake for 8 minutes or until they start to get golden brown.
Decorating
- This is of course optional, but I finished with some melted chocalte drizzled on top, and pearl sugar sprinkled onto that.
They came out great! A bit on the cakey side.. I tried making thinner ones and had a lot of trouble getting them to stay together. Next batch I’ll do 1/4″ again, but add a couple of minutes to the baking time to get them to crisp up a bit more.
