This dough produces a cookie with just enough crispness! It’s become our favorite, and we’ve tried a lot of recipes over the years. Our favorite fillings are the very traditional Poppy Seed Filling and Prune Filling, but you can be creative.

Mix together in a bowl

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt

In the bowl of a mixer (or large bowl, by hand) beat

• 2 large eggs

Add and mix completely

• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 tsp vanilla

Add the dry ingredients and mix just until a uniform dough forms. If the dough doesn’t hold together, sprinkle a bit of water in and continue to mix; if it seems to wet, work in a bit of extra flour.

You can use the dough right away but I often make all the fillings and dough the day before and refrigerate them. The baking happens the next day with the help of some friends.

To make the hamentaschen, preheat the oven to 325º F. Roll the dough to the desired thickness. Under 1/8-inch gives crisp, thin cookies, but you can make them up to 1/4-inch thick. Place the filling, ♦ATTN wet 3 places where you’ll form corners with a bit of water and form the triangles. This dough has a bit more leavening than some of the other doughs I have tried: if you don’t seal the corners they will pop open! Place the cookies on an oiled sheet pan, leaving a bit of space between them.

Make an egg glaze by beating together

• 1 egg
• 2 tsp water

When the cookies are ready to go in the oven, brush them with the glaze and bake for about 18-20 minutes. The timing will vary according to your oven, the thickness of the dough and how dark you like the dough to get.

Remove from oven and let cool on sheet for a couple minutes before transfering to racks to complete cooling. These will get soft if you put them in a closed container so we leave them on the counter for a day or two. They don’t last much longer than that at our house unless I make a huge batch, in which case I have frozen them successfully.

Adapted from a recipe by Torey Avey.

Poppy seeds are difficult to grind unless you have a specialty grinder. It’s kind of like a manual coffee mill, but you really can’t use a coffee grinder. I have tried. ♦ATTNIf you don’t have such a grinder, look for another recipe that soaks and cooks the poppy seeds as the following will not work.

In a poppy-seed mill, grind

•  8 ounces (about 1–1/2 cups poppy seeds)

Heat the following ingredients to dissolve sugar without boiling the milk.

• 1 cup milk
• 4 TBL butter
• 2/3 cup sugar (or more to taste)
• pinch of salt

Remove the mixture from the heat. In a large bowl, beat

• 2 eggs

In small amounts, add more and more of the milk mixture to the eggs, but ♦ATTNnot too much at once or the eggs will cook. The idea is to gradually warm up the eggs and combine them with the milk. Once you have added half the milk to the eggs, pour it all back into the pan on the heat and let it cook until thickened into a smooth custard, but ♦ATTNdon’t let it approach a boil!  Remove from the heat, stir in the ground poppy seeds and let the mixture cool. It can keep a couple days in the refrigerator.

Note that sometimes I’ve just added sugar and milk to the ground poppy seeds to make a filling. It’s not as satisfying but in a pinch it works. If you need a non-dairy filling you can use corn syrup and mix it with the ground poppy seeds and skip the custard/milk process completely.

Adapted from a recipe from Olga’s Flavor Factory.