Week 6

This week at my internship, we catered a wedding. For this I did usual prep work of chopping lots vegetables. I also did a lot of baking. One of the unique things I made was cornmeal, lemon, and black pepper cookies. I have not had a chance to try these cookies yet, as I just made the dough and scooped it, but they look very interesting. I also made several cakes including a ginger cake with pistachios and orange cream cheese frosting.

Since today is Purim, I made hamantashen. Hamantashen are somewhat similar to sugar cookies, but have orange juice in the batter and are commonly filled with fruit jam or poppy seed. The one thing I discovered when making these cookies was that I could not rely on the recipe. My first problem was the dough was very sticky. Since Arizona is dry I did not want to add too much flour so I refrigerated the dough to make it easier to roll out, but it was still too sticky to shape into triangles. I caved and added more flour. This solved the texture problem. My other problem was that first batch was overcooked. I baked them for 15 minutes, when the recipe said 20, and they were still over cooked. I fiddled with the recipe and made excellent hamantashen.