If there’s one word that doesn’t come up much on this site, it’s GORGEOUS. That’s because I’m all about flavour and convenience. If something tastes great, it’s not too much potchke to make, and it comes out reliably every single time, then it’ll go on my list of favourites. If it’s a hassle and never quite succeeds – well, it’s not one I’ll try more than a couple of times, let alone share with you here. You might think these Florentine cookies are the exception. They certainly LOOK potchke-dik, especially if you garnish them up with drizzled chocolate, sprinkled icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar), or whatever frou-frou touches you care to add. But that’s the thing – they’re not . These are startlingly delicious and easy to make! And DEFINITELY fall into that magical category of “I can’t believe they’re really pareve.” (Or vegan, or whatever your food choices are…) Why Florentine cookies? I grew up eating Florentine cookies, which we’d buy at Yitz’s (not-kosher) del...

Pareve shortbread???? Vegan shortbread? Shortbread that showcases the unique, lovely, and delicate flavours of the Land of Israel? And hey, while we're dreaming, a fast, easy shortbread that comes together in a few fuss-free minutes? Have I got a recipe for you! This Lemon, Rosemary, and Olive Oil Shortbread recipe from Cookie and Kate combines just a few simple and unlikely ingredients, and the result is a great big sophisticated thumbs up.   Let me say right up front that while I love lemon desserts, I am not a massive olive oil fan, and naturally shy away from using it in desserts, except for this amazing Pesach olive oil mousse , which I make, in which the chocolate almost totally masks any olive-oily flavour.   So if you're not an olive oil fan

I wanted something different for dessert this Shabbos and for whatever reason, my mind went to the stash of Kool Aid that's been sitting in the cupboard here for over a year.  And the only flavour of Kool Aid that counts, as far as I'm concerned, is Strawberry. Feel free to make these with any colour you want! Anyway, an image of these swirly cookies swirled into my mind and I knew exactly how I was going to make them. All I needed was a decent sugar-cookie recipe that didn't rely overly much on butter.  I've used a couple of pareve sugar cookie recipes in the past, including this one from Couldn't be Parve , which uses margarine, and these ones which use shortening.  But here in Israel, I don't like the taste of the margarine, there are no "healthier" margarines available, and shortening simply doesn't exist.  My substitute has become coconut oil, or (sometimes) half and half margarine and coconut oil.  So I started looking around for r...

Vegan guests coming for Shabbos dinner?  No problem!  Forget trying to make or buy some kind of special vegan dessert.  Try this adaptation of a classic favourite – your family will probably never notice the difference!  If you’ve got these SIX magic ingredients (not counting water; you do have water, right?), you’ve got what it takes to make these awesomely delicious peanut-butter cookies.  They’re butter-free, margarine-free, and you can control the amount of sugar by choosing a healthier brand than the fancy name-brand sugar-added peanut butter than I have used here.  Because this recipe is so incredibly simple, it would also be a good one to play around with.  Try adding chocolate chips, if that's your thing (and whose isn't it???), or little jammy thumbprints.  If it comes out great, let me know! Ready? Here are these SIX magic ingredients… Kosher Vegan Peanut-Butter Cookies (Adapted from Spoon University ) (makes 20 generously-...

It may not be summer yet, but we’ve had a few days so far that have really hinted that it’s on its way.  And for summer Shabboses, what’s really nice is an easy no-bake dessert that isn’t tremendously patchkedik (involved, preparation-wise). These truffles capture the “cookie dough” vibe perfectly – they’re soft inside and not too sweet for a grown-up palate, but not too peanut-buttery and healthy-tasting (okay, they’re not healthy at all!) that kids will turn up their noses.  In other words, they’re just right.  And you can make them with just FIVE things you probably have sitting around your kitchen the week after Pesach – at least, I did.

The theme of Purim is “venahafoch hu” – it was overturned.  Everything is flipped around at this busy, zany, fun time of year… including the tedium of using the same traditional recipes, year in and year out.  There’s a time for “ moon and prune ” (the traditional poppy and prune fillings), of course.  But why not turn to one of these jaw-dropping new creations to discover a brand-new favourite you can proudly share with family and friends?  There’s certainly plenty here to choose from… 1. Gingerbread / chocolate hamentaschen 2. Rainbow hamentaschen 3. Nutella hamentaschen 4. Black sesame hamentaschen 5. Yeasty hamentaschen 6. Candy-cane cheesecake hamentaschen

Know what the most popular post on this site is, right at this very moment?  By far? It’s a post called “ Mmm… kichelicious .” I adore kichel, the dry unsweetened European cookie that has been a staple of Jewish life since… well, probably since someone’s Bubby needed to make cookies and discovered that she was out of sugar.  Apparently, thousands of people out there on the Internet love kichel and want to know how to make it well at home. But celebrity kosher baker Paula Shoyer does not.  Which is too bad, because in every other way, she’s absolutely perfect.  I enjoyed a baking demo she did yesterday at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro.  She did a really great job of preparing a couple of basic recipes that I hope to share with you very soon. But the real reason for her crusade to bring simple, delicious pareve baking recipes to home cooks is because, as she said yesterday, “in the U.S., pareve desserts… are absolutely horr...

What do you feed your kids when they walk through the door? (Or do you feed them at all?) I admit, this is one of my weaknesses as a parent.  One of the things I’m really not so good at. Maybe you’re better than me at this (if so, I want to hear from you in the comments!), but perhaps the thing I’m worst at, as a parent, is feeding starving kids – my own. When they walk in the door after school, they’re famished.  Not literally starving, as I’ve told them many times.  But they are very, very hungry. Worse still is that they usually don’t realize it yet.  They don’t feel hungry – but they are.

Many social media people have been worried over the last few days:  apparently, if you Google “Israel,” you get all kinds of dire, terrible images. This post is my attempt to fix that. So why is the word “rogelach” in quotes up at the top?  Because if you just google rogelach (or, as I did, rugelach), most of the recipes you’ll find involve cream cheese, and possibly milk and butter.  It seems that us pareve people are in the minority when it comes to rogelach. And because dairy does such incredible, delicious things when it lives inside a dough, these can never be truly “real” rogelach.  But they can be a tasty, rogelach-shaped puffy cookie on your Shabbos table (or any other day of the week’s table), and some weeks, it just doesn’t get better than that. I started with regular leftover challah dough.  If you need a recipe, you can try my Reliable Challah recipe . If you happen to have leftover dough sitting around, you may find these so easy you’ll ...

What are kichel, you ask?  Whether you know them as “bow-ties” or “nothings” or “eyer-kichel” (my Bubby’s version) or “keekle,” they are cookies, but they are so much more than cookies.  Actually, they are both more and less than cookies.  They are puffed-up egg and air trapped in a gluteny web of flour.  They are not themselves sweet, but coated in sugar so eaters think they are.  Good kichel are addictive:  like popcorn, you can’t eat just one.  Though heavy and Jewish and rich and filling, they are also just that little bit zen. And now I have learned the secret to making good ones! Growing up, I was fascinated by everything about my mother’s new mixer.  Yes, even ten years later, it was still her new mixer.  It was special:  it was a Kenwood Chef.  She had to special-order it from England, and after she did, spent the next ten years correcting people who thought it was a Ken more .  Ken more was a cheap Sears brand ...

There are only two kinds of hamentaschen for those who don’t mess around:  moon and prune. This is a truth I learned as a small child, growing up in a home where, for whatever reason, the Two Kinds (let’s capitalize them for convenience) were the Only Kinds. Moon = poppy seed.  Prune = dried plums. (the word moon = my father’s variation on the Yiddish/german mohn ) A few years back, my sister, who’s a baker, offered for sale a pastry she’d made with “dried plums” because it sounded way classier than saying “prunes.”  It sure does.  In Hebrew, there’s no distinction.  “Dried plums” is the only thing you can call them. But they do mess around a LOT, with all kinds of flavours, from chocolate (okay) to halva (kind of okay) and many others… but they also don’t call them hamentashen – they’re called oznei haman; haman’s ears.  For those who don’t mess around, they’re hamentaschen – haman’s pockets . My way or the highway.  A lesson I learned ...

Coming back from Israel just yesterday, I wanted hamentaschen that reflected all that we’d enjoyed there, culinarily.  I didn’t quite hit the mark, but I did come up with two cute variations… I used my usual dough recipe from Second Helpings, Please (image below), though I don’t love it because it tends to misbehave in unpredictable ways.  It has never come out the same way twice in twenty years (sigh, I feel so old saying that, but it’s true – the cookbook was a wedding present at my first wedding, and the children of that marriage are now far closer to 20 than to zero). This time, I did it in the food processor, where, of course, it totally jammed and made a sticky mess.  Ultimately, I added a lot more flour than usual and they came out okay.  It doesn’t taste like it usually does, but it worked. I always do one batch with a classic prune filling – or, as my baker sister likes to say, dried plums.  It just sounds so much swankier that way. For th...

Blogging while my challah bakes in a stolen moment on a busy school-day work-day Friday… There are 2 schools of thought when it comes to rogelach (well, besides the totally OTHER school of thought that pronounces them “rugelach” thus causing both mirth and confusion when discussing the vegetable called arugula )… where was I? Oh, yeah.  2 schools of thought:  creamy or yeasty.  Many recipes call for cream cheese, butter, etc.  This gives a very nice, rich dough that is sometimes flaky, but is more “new world” than traditional, in my opinion.  “Old world” is to make a pareve treat you can actually eat following a good meaty Shabbos meal.  (“Awesome new world” is to think of these not as PAREVE but as VEGAN… oh, but start with an eggless dough if you want to totally feel the vegan virtue.) Like kokosh, blueberry buns, and many other yeasted delicacies from the Ashkenaz tradition, rugelach were probably invented as a way of either using up challah doug...

BONUS COOKING TIP OF THE DAY – scroll to the bottom of this post! Mmm… my favourite way to unwind on Friday afternoon, when there’s time, is to sample the yummies for Shabbos and blog about them! This week, it’s these scrummy chocolate cookies that start out really good but transform into utter decadence with the help of a caramel filling and chocolate coating .  They’re not TOO patckedik, either. (read on for how it’s done…) The actual chocolate cookies came from this recipe from Frugal Ima’s blog (I reduced the vanilla quite a bit), and I baked them last night, because I have had enough bad experiences of baked goods that were not sufficiently cool to ice.  This is Frugal Ima’s picture, because I forgot to take one myself.   The trick here is pressing down the middle of the cookies RIGHT AWAY when they come out of the oven.  Like her, I used the lid of the vanilla bottle to make the indentation. This recipe made a LOT of cookies. Then, this mo...

Searching for the perfect Pareve Sugar Cookie recipe a few weeks ago, I found a bunch of references online to a now-defunct blog post (if you click the link, you will probably get a message telling you just how defunct) explaining how you could create your own sugar cookie mix in bulk. Intrigued, I tracked down an old cached copy of the post, with the recipe, and stashed it off-line for safekeeping.  And yes, it uses shortening, and if you don’t want to use shortening, then don’t.  Sometimes, you kind of have to.  I use Butter-flavoured Crisco now that it’s pareve again here. Here’s the recipe – shamelessly reposted word-for-word as a service to you, my beloved readers: Sugar Cookies for the YEAR! Warning: This makes a LOT of sugar cookie mix. We store it in freezer zip lock bags, pre-measured and ready-to-go at any time. (see below) Ingredients: 12 cups all-purpose flour 6 cups sugar 2 Tablespoons baking powder 1 Tables...