all right, i may as well just admit it: we didn't make hamentashen so much as we made pre-jammed triangular toast. but it's good pre-jammed triangular toast!

how it happened: after a wrap dinner, so we wouldn't be hungry while we shopped, we went to ISO, the supermarket near me with the distinction of having great food and employees who don't speak english. we located all the items on the list, only substituting margarine for butter. in the floury aisle a woman responded to our request for baking powder by pulling down a little brown packet from the wall. we looked uncertainly at each other and back at her. she nodded confidently. we shrugged and went with it.
back in my kitchen, we dealt with minor crises. no measuring cups! no, wait, there's something that looks like one in the back of the cupboard here. the dough's way too liquidy to knead. ha ha, just kidding, says andrea, i forgot to add half the flour. (flour becomes a theme later when the kneading starts. initially we're hesitant about using it; by the end, we're happily up to our elbows like kids in a sandbox.) the baking powder elicits a near-shriek as it's brown and smells like the inside of a havdala box. it's all we have, i say, just throw it in. no rolling pin! well, a newly bought can of corn works. we manage to pummel it to the reccommended thinness. how to measure the six cm for the diameter of each? just gimme a small glass, says andrea finally, and we use that. only later, when we add filling, we don't account for the fact that our cookies are smaller than they're supposed to be and later press our noses to the oven glass as the jam bubbles and oozes out of the cookie cracks.
all this to a soundtrack of near-constant laughter, interspersed with rent snatches and my camera going click.

the first batch is too crunchy. we name it 'the little fuckers' and move on. second, a decent consistency, still too much filling (andrea insists on spoiling them, but she's great at folding them up into the proper shapes.) we name them 'alvin and brittany' after the only middle children in popculture we could think of. the third batch, 'the accidents,' as they're mostly composed of extra dough, end up being the most successful.
they look disturbingly like biology diagrams, and the plain fact is, they're just not sweet. andrea encourages me to face up to this. eventually i do. the important thing is we (a) had fun; (b) didn't burn anything down or quit; and (c) baked! oh yeah baby. beat that.