Have you ever been to the Internet? It's great. It's filled with ways to connect to friends and family, even when we are parted by distance or social distance. There are things to buy and things to learn and you can have your own website where you just send your stream of consciousness out into the ether.
It is also a place of endless advice. Heaven forbid you post about your headache or your bad day or your failed recipe just to find some commiseration. You may find some sympathetic ears, but, rest assured, the unsolicited advice will find you. Have you tried yoga for your headache? How about supplements? Have you thought about meditation for your bad day? Or maybe you should just quit your job? And that recipe? I've never had that happen, did you put it in the fridge? No, not the fridge, let it sit at room temp. You over mixed. You under mixed. What a mess you made.
Is there a story here? Of course there is.
Purim is coming soon and I like to make hamantaschen. If you've never met a hamantaschen, they are three cornered cookies with filling. The most common recipes for hamantaschen, in this era, are cookie dough based, but there is another kind – the yeast dough hamantasch.
I am a half-assed homemaker, but I take my baking very seriously. Seriously enough that I would say I never bake at less than three-quarters ass and occasionally put my whole ass into it. This year, I set out to make yeast hamantaschen. I'm a good baker! I get yeast dough! Why not mix it up?
I flipped through cookbooks old and new, some of the older ones, the ones being held together by 50 year old sellotape, didn't even offer a cookie dough version. Yeast dough hamantaschen were the standard. I also checked the internet, but I like my recipes on paper so that my screen doesn't go to sleep when I am elbow deep in flour and egg.
The dough was gorgeous. Smooth, soft, sweet and yeasty. I had high hopes when I put them in the oven after their second rise and then?
The yeast did it's thing in a big way. I had not made hamantaschen so much as I had produced sweet jam buns.
Don't get me wrong. They are good eating. Call them a breakfast food and they would make sense in any homey coffee shop. But hamantaschen they were not.
So I posted about them in one of my food groups on the internet. I explained that these are my white whale. That yeasted hamantaschen are a nut yet to be cracked for me. I was clear that I just wanted to share how they turned out. There were many comments about how it's always the taste more than the look, which is true, except that the aesthetic of this particular baked good is central to its whole thing, but the sentiment holds.
Then came reams of advice. And almost all of that advice is great... if what I had been baking was the cookie dough version. Baking soda and yeast create vastly different rises. One is bread. The other is a cookie. But no matter how many times I thanked people for their ideas and gently said, "but this is a yeast dough." It kept coming.
There were also the doubters, they had never heard of yeasted hamantaschen. (I would have pointed them to the yellowing pages of those cookbooks if I wanted to drag it out, but I didn't.) Or they simply couldn't understand why I bothered with a yeasted version if the cookie version is right there. It's the same reason some people climb mountains, because it's there.
Advice is amazing. Unsolicited advice is exhausting. And in this case, it set me on a path to seek redemption. I just had to prove myself, that I can too make the recipe that everyone thought I was or should be making.
So, I made the cookie dough version, and, you know what? All of that advice about how to make them hold shape and come out beautifully? It works. For you recipe hounds, the second recipe that turned out smashing cookie dough versions are from the cookbook The World of Jewish Desserts by Gil Marks. It's a great book and I highly recommend. For the filling, I used regular old jam from the shelves of the grocery store.
I'll keep plugging away at the yeasted version, I just won't post them anywhere until I've mastered them. In the meantime, we have a lot of baked goods to get through at House Half-Assed.
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