I made the Hamentaschen with seeds, and they came out reasonably well. I made sure to use egg wash on the pastry to give it a satin, not shiny, finish. The filling balls were the most difficult to make, as the filling, right after it’s combined, is waaay too too hot to touch without risking a burn (and you thought oil burns were bad – sugar gets hundreds of degrees hotter than oil when it’s melted). Even after I returned from the Sierra Club meeting, which lasted over an hour, plus the drive both ways, the mixture was still warm. I went through four pair of nitrile gloves while handling the filling because it was just so sticky!
In the end, I was okay with the way they’d turned out. Fortunately, the nuts made the cookies less sweet than hamentaschen made with fruit compote. Unfortunately, I neglected to photograph them straightaway after taking them out of the oven (the recipe makes 24 total), so I don’t even have a photo of them to show!
I remember making poppy seed hamentaschen at Milton’s. They were the one cookie we baked that I wanted to taste, but I never had the opportunity because I was always working, with very little time between tasks. It also didn’t help that the workplace had become somewhat hostile because the other baker didn’t seem to like me because I was not Hispanic, as most of the kitchen staff were. In the end, after I was essentially fired, I was somewhat relieved because I could look for an employer who would not fire me after learning I have memory issues. And, while working at Il Fornaio in Del Mar, I never felt left out because even though the manager/owner was Italian (like, an immigrant from Italy), most of the kitchen staff were Hispanic, including the pizza maker, whose station was next to mine.
I went to a restaurant website and read a few reviews from recent weeks of Il Fornaio. They were almost all quite critical, written by patrons who wrote that they’ll not be returning. It made me a little sad to read because while I was there (and that was three years ago), the food (at least that which I got to eat, which was primarily pizza, tiramisu, and Caesar salad) was good, especially for a “chain” (there were three locations at the time, with the other two in NorCal and ours in SoCal). It appears that with expansion, their quality control was lost. Really a shame.
This afternoon, I baked a Pullman loaf, and the kitchen smelled wonderful, as it will when baking, especially bread. And my Pullman loaf is almost like brioche, with eggs, milk, and butter. It should be cool so I can slice it this evening.
nkpyallinone 