Secret Recipe

It is an ongoing joke that I married my husband for his family hamantaschen recipe. That was over 30 years ago. This weekend, while he and our daughter were away skiing in Maine, I could no longer resist the various other recipes I have secretly collected over the years. They had barely pulled out of our driveway when I scrolled through my Pinterest page and selected not one, but two, new-to-me recipes. And I cheated!

It isn’t as if I forgot about my family when I chose to do this. I selected pecan pie hamantaschen thinking of my pecan-loving husband. I chose chocolate chip cookie hamantaschen and filled them with Nutella knowing our daughter’s tastes. I was excited! I felt adventurous! Daring almost.

And what did I learn from this?

If you have something good, really good, don’t mess with it! The hamantaschen made from the new recipes were not bad. They were okay. Fine even. But neither of them held a candle to the ones made from his family recipe, now our family recipe.

I mixed up a double batch of that amazing orange-infused dough and it is now chilling in the fridge waiting for them to return so we can finish baking them together.