Ingredients:

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
2 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 cup peanut butter powder (I used PBFit)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

 jam (I used elderberry jam)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, vanilla and egg. Add the remaining dry ingredients. Mix until smooth.

Roll the dough out onto a clean, floured surface. When the dough is about a 1/4 inch thick, cut 2 1/2-3 inch circles out of the dough using a cookie, biscuit or doughnut cutter. Place them on the prepared pans.

Spoon some jam into the middle of each circle. Fold three sides towards the center and press down to form a triangle.

Do not re-roll dough. Cut scraps into small shapes and bake as-is, if desired.

Bake 12 minutes or until golden. Cool on a wire rack.

Yield: about 2 dozen cookies

My thoughts:

Happy Purim! Another year, another kind of hamantaschen!

This year was a little fraught because I just got back from the IACP conference in NYC which was fun but tiring and my rolling pin broke while I was rolling out the cookies! Oy! I didn’t manage to make a whole batch unfortunately but the ones I made were really good. What is a more classic combination than peanut butter and jelly? Of course, for hamantashen, you need to use jam not jelly but the results are just as tasty as the classic sandwich, I promise.

I used peanut butter powder (which is available nearly everywhere now!) instead of prepared peanut butter because I wanted the cookie to have that butter cookie taste and texture and it is hard to do that when using peanut butter as your fat. Peanut butter powder works more like flour so you can have that butter cookie but with the peanut butter flavor.

I wrote an article about Purim and hamantaschen for NPR a while back and since then, I’ve created recipes for a rugelach-inspired cream cheese based hamantaschen, chocolate hamantaschen, pareve/vegan hamantaschen filled with kiwi jam,  orange ginger hamantaschen, and pareve/vegan fig-orange hamantaschen spiked with butternut squash, and double orange hamantaschen.

Quick note: peanut butter dough is a bit more crumbly and finicky to work with than other rolled cookie dough. Roll to  1/4 inch thick and cut just once. Re-rolling the scraps is not advised. If desired, simply cut out shapes with the scraps.  Do not make the cookies too thick or they will split when you shape them.