The yearly posting of the hamentaschen

Purim is Sunday, so it's that time. This is my great-grandmother's recipe, and I have never encountered a better one.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter or margarine (Crisco if you want ’em pareve)
1 egg
2 T orange juice
Filling of choice– poppyseed, prune, blueberry or cherry pie filling, various jams, chocolate, Nutella. I really like them filled with apples, chopped up fine and mixed with a little honey and a lot of cinnamon.

Directions:

Mix sugar, flour, BP, salt in bowl; work in softened (NOT melted) butter

separate bowl– mix egg and OJ, then add to rest of ingredients; mix until it’s dough.

Refrigerate 1 hour.

Roll out, cut into circles– use a cookie cutter or a large drinking glass for this. Place large spoonful of filling in center of each circle, and pinch dough into a triangle around it. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes.

Cookies will be crisp when they first come out of the oven, but seal them in Tupperware for the night and they will get soft and ridiculously delicious.

Enjoy!

eta: a note regarding fillings. While I list a number of options, my personal preference is for good-quality jam or preserves, the kind that use real sugar and not corn syrup. Thus far this year I have made mango, blueberry, and raspberry-- all excellent-- and am planning to make peach and apricot. Cherry I often find to be too tart. I also have a jar of lingonberry jam from IKEA purchased with hamentaschen in mind. I will report back on how they turn out.