Earl Grey and Apricot Hamantaschen

While I had never heard of Earl Grey and Apricot Hamantschen cookies before this recipe, I certainly had seen and tasted them before; I simply always knew them as just a triangular, jam-filled cookie. But little did I know how much work actually goes into one of these triangular cookies…and how easily they can go wrong.

I decided to make these cookies on the fly since I had just about all the ingredients. I didn’t have dried apricots, and truthfully I didn’t want to spend the money on them…but I did have apricot preserves. Instead of following Claire’s steps for making the filling, I started everything off with a risk. I made a pot of the earl grey tea, but only used a few tablespoons of it with the apricot preserves, honey and lemon zest. I brought to a boil like Claire directed, then let it simmer. Since I didn’t need to mash anything, I added sugar to make it all combine a bit more. After 25 to 30 minutes (which is what Claire suggested for simmering originally), I knew my filling was still way too thin. I added some more sugar, played with the temperature, and after probably an hour and 15 minutes, it finally seemed thick enough to work if I put it in the fridge for a while.

While all that was happening, I also worked on the cookie dough. I blended butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, egg yolk, vanilla and lemon zest in the food processor. Once that formed a dough, I threw in the dry ingredients and pulsed more. The dough was similar to a buttercream consistency than cookie dough by this point. I split it in two, placed it on plastic wrap and chilled it for two hours. Even after that time in the fridge, it was firm but still sticky; pretty much the equivalent of what happens with sugar cookie dough when it’s not cold (this isn’t too surprising considering the ingredients are practically identical for both types of cookies).

This stickiness required a LOT of sprinkled flour as I rolled out the dough and cut circles with a biscuit cutter—to the point where I was dusting flour off the dough circles once I was done. I took my self-imagined jam mixture from the fridge, and it was just the right firm consistency where I could easily take a spoonful and place it on the cookie dough circles without worrying it would become a messy pile of liquid. And it tasted pretty good! Once the jam was on the cookie circles, I folded the sides into triangles, brushed the dough with egg wash and sprinkled on poppy seeds.

The first batch of cookies baked for about 24 minutes, and that was WAY too long. I did not have parchment paper on the baking sheets, which I think screwed me over. The cookies were way too dark and looked like they were grabbing on to the metal sheet for dear life. For the second batch, I took them out around 21 minutes; they still were not nearly as pretty as I hoped, but much better than the first batch. Not going to lie, this was a bit of a bummer after all that work.

The Earl Grey and Apricot Hamantaschen cookies tasted exactly as I envisioned and remembered from similar cookies; the dough was light and chewy, and the jam was the perfect consistency! In some ways, I wish these cookies turned out better in terms of appearance, but the taste was a hit. For a cookie, this is a very involved recipe, but if you’ve made just about every other type of drop or roll cookie, it’s worth a try!

Claire has not yet made this recipe on her YouTube channel; I’ll post it when she does!