What the H….amantaschen is that!?
It’s a risk that epitomizes the type of risks my wife and I face each day through our son. He has severe food allergies. No nuts. No wheat. No chicken eggs. No chicken meat. No dairy. No shellfish. No sorghum, quinoa, corn, tomatoes, strawberries… there are also some restrictions with red dye and sugar (though he can have that every once in a while). We keep an epipen handy and have our own nebulizer.
With great restrictions comes risk. It’s not “necessity” alone that mothers invention. It’s the necessity with restrictions that force us to be take risks – to be inventive. It’s what created the electric shaver and the sewing machine.
How do you create a special treat that someone with so many restrictions can have? You have to get creative, and sometimes a little rushed assumption helps the process along.
“Do we have any egg replacer?” I asked my wife. “No. But I have a recipe that uses gelatin.” Her fingers scampered across her iPhone. “I just sent it to you in an email.”
I looked over the recipe. There were some brand-names mentioned. I remember us having unflavored gelatin at one time… but we were out. Tonight is the only time I have to bake the Hamantaschen cookies before Purim. I scampered through all our pantries. We had a box of strawberry gelatin … naturally flavored. Does natural strawberry flavor have the same effect on my son as an actual strawberry? Better not risk it. I grabbed a box of artificially flavored cherry jello and started working the recipe my wife gave.
Looking at the “Immaculate” brand Gluten Free Sugar Cookie Mix directions: 1 stick (1/2 cup) of softened butter – my son can’t have that. I need to replace the butter. Last time I did a one-to-one replacement with coconut oil. That ended up bad. All the cookies were greasy. Lesson learned. I’ll use half the amount of coconut oil instead. But what do I replace the remaining missing butter with? Maybe more egg replacer… more jello. The idea is for the dough to spread and set. That’s what drop cookies do… Oh! I need to shape these… no problem, I’ll just add a little less moisture so that I can roll it out … or so I thought.
While mixing up the measured amount of cherry gelatin with lemon juice and hot water I realized it didn’t look right. It isn’t setting like an egg replacer should… but I didn’t have time, and I was determined to make a cookie that he could have.
I jumped to adding the strongly scented cherry gelatin mixture and coconut oil into the cookie mix. After thoroughly mixing it together, it was obvious that I needed more moisture. After carefully adding just a little more hot water it looked like a drop dough recipe. You can’t fold the dough into the traditional “hat” shapes. My heart sank a little. I felt like I was failing. In a sense, I was. This step in the process was nothing like I wanted. I let the dough sit in the bowl while I thought up a plan.
One of my daughters walked into the kitchen and squealed with delight when she saw it! “It’s pink!” she paused. “It’s so pink!“
She’s right. I have tried all sorts of food coloring before and I never saw cookie dough this brightly colored before. Maybe gelatin is a better coloring agent because of how the dye is captured in its crystals.
They’re going to be drop-dough cookies. I told her. How do I make them round and fold them into the hats? (For those unfamiliar with Hamantaschen cookies, they are traditionally made by folding a round-cut rolled-out sugar cookie dough into the shape of a three-cornered hat.)
A thought came to mind … maybe the solution to my problem exists in the culmination of my cookie dough failure itself! With all that gelatin, it can set in a more pliable manner … if I pull them out of the oven at just the right time, the cookies will be malleable enough to fold without breaking.
I scooped up little balls of the cookie dough and placed them on the silpat and into the oven. I watched a timer carefully when baking them. At three minutes, they had spread out into circles … good. At five minutes, they were too soft to move with a spatula. At eight minutes… I gave them a try. I took the sheet out of the oven and to my amazement, it was like shaping hot, soft play-dough!
I quickly shaped all the cookies on the sheet – small batches of 10 cookies at a time – then put the sheets back in the oven for another 5 minutes. They came out looking like very pink Hamantaschen!
I’ve tried all sorts of food coloring in dough the past, and it has always ended up yellowing or browning around the edges. These cookies were perfectly, consistently pink.
On the second batch, I tried to fold them at 6 minutes. The two that I tried were too soft and didn’t hold their shape. At 8 minutes exactly, the cookies were foldable. Those two ended up looking like a tesseract of sorts when I refolded them. Fun!
After the third batch of cookies, I was out of dough. I surveyed the concoction I made. It was a failure with not having egg replacer mix that brought me to using an egg replacer recipe. It was a failure of not seeing the canister of unflavored brand-name gelatin (that my wife had written into the recipe) that brought me to using cherry flavored jello. It was my using of that jello to replace half the butter that caused the batter to not be rollable. It was the failure of it not being rollable that led me to sit and think creatively. I wouldn’t be surprised if the time I spent thinking up a solution out of this mess gave the batter time to “rise” and form properly within the bowl.
Eventually, all these failures created something never tried before. 3 tablespoons of cherry jello, 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1/4 cup of coconut oil, a bit of hot water and 15 ounces of cookie mix … left for a moment to rise and set in an oven for 8 minutes, then folded, then baked for another 5 minutes … served with a drizzle of home-made chocolate sauce (chocolate covered cherry cookies, anyone?) … produced brightly colored, perfectly chewy, sweet & tasty, child-glee inducing success!
When in the midst of risk, and when things get riskier. Sometimes it pays to not give up – to stick with it to the end. There are times to know when to quit. That’s my weak leadership skill that I’m working on… but my strength is that I don’t give up, and that … more often than not … produces … victory!
This article is from the “Raw Talk on Failure” series.
