‏אױף דער לינקער זײַט - ‏ Inside-out Pumpkin Hamentashn --

Purim, like its temporal neighbor Mardi Gras, is a feast of inversion, so turning one's hamentashn inside out seems like the most reasonable thing to do.  I actually like these even better than the right-side-in hamentashn, but both the dough and filling are more difficult to prepare and handle.
I looked at many pumpkin jam recipes while making these.  some call for cooking the pumpkin first, some for starting the jam with raw pumpkin, which is what I did.  I think cooking the pumpkin first might have made a more pumpkiny filling.  Traditional Greek recipes also call for mastic, which I did not have on hand.

Pumpkin Seed Pastry

6 ounces (1 1/2 cups) flour
4 1/2 ounces (1 cup) toasted ground pumpkin seeds
5 1/2 ounces (3/4 cup) sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 ounces (3/4 cup, 1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 egg
Combine flour, ground seeds,  sugar, and baking powder.  Rub in the butter with a pastry blender or your fingers.  Stir in the beaten egg with a fork.  Chill the dough briefly.


This pliant dough rolled out very nicely and folded into hamentashn with no resistance.  I should have suspected right away it had something up its doughy little sleeve.  The first batch, baked at 375 F, melted into shapeless little blobs.  Flavorful little blobs, but shapeless blobs nevertheless.  The next batch, chilled in the freezer and baked at 325 F, melted into shapeless little blobs (above left).  For the third batch, I just made them into thumbprint cookies and tried to coax them into a triangular shape (above right).

Pumpkin Jam Filling

11 ounces (2 cups diced) pumpkin or other flavorful squash such as butternut or kabocha
11 ounces (1 1/2 cups) sugar
juice and zest of one lemon
5 slices candies ginger
1 small cinnamon stick
3 cloves
Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the pumpkin pieces are soft and the syrup is thick.

Assembly
Preheat the oven to 325 F.
Roll out the dough about 3/16 inch thick, a bit thicker than your typical hamentash dough, and cut into circles to fill with jam, or simply roll the dough into balls and make indentations for the filling.  Fill with pumpkin jam.  As the components approach room temperature, the dough will get very soft and the filling will get firm, so you are racing the clock.  Chill the formed hamentashn for 20 minutes and bake for 30 minutes.

 ‏אױף דער לינקער זײַט

af der linker zayt  

inside out (literally: on the left side)