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These Mexican wedding cookies/hamantaschen are a brand-new fusion recipe I created for J. staff writer Emma Goss and her husband, Héber Cruz Berber, who got married on Feb. 23 in Mexico.
In July 2024 Emma shared with me what she and Héber wanted a cookie to communicate about their backgrounds, their wedding and their future as a couple. Emma said that hamantaschen were a happy food memory for her, and they wanted Héber’s Mexican heritage to be baked into the recipe, too.
Mexican wedding cookies (also known as polvorones) made sense as inspiration for the dough. Emma and Héber love Mexican chocolate with a hint of cinnamon, so I chose a babka-style chocolate filling from my cookbook, “The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook,” and modified it to include Mexican chocolate flavors.
Mexican Wedding Hamantaschen
Makes around 24
For the dough:
- ½ cup toasted and finely ground pecans
- ¼ cup powdered sugar
- 2¼ cups flour
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- ½ tsp. kosher salt
- ¾ cup unsalted butter, cold and cubed
- 1 large egg
For the chocolate filling:
- ½ cup dark chocolate (good-quality chips such as Guittard)
- ¼ cup unsalted butter
- ½ cup light brown brown sugar (dark also OK)
- ¼ cup powdered sugar, plus a little extra for sprinkling
- 2 Tbs. unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 packet Abuelita cocoa mix (available in many supermarkets, but if you can’t find it, use one packet of regular hot cocoa mix and add an extra ½ tsp. cinnamon)
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- ½ tsp. instant espresso
- ½ tsp. kosher salt
Make the dough: In the bowl of the food processor, chop the pecans by pulsing a few times. When almost finely ground (think coarse sand), add the powdered sugar and pulse a few times to combine with nuts. Remove the nut mixture from the processor and set aside.
Put flour, granulated sugar and salt into the processor bowl and pulse a couple times to combine (cover the hole so the flour doesn’t splash in your face).
Add cubed cold butter. Process until incorporated. Flour mixture will be coarse and there shouldn’t be any giant lumps of butter.
Add nut mixture back in and pulse a few times to combine, then add egg and pulse a few times more; the dough will come together quickly. As soon as it does and the egg is well incorporated, stop mixing and turn the dough out onto a piece of parchment paper or clean surface.
Divide the dough blob roughly in half, flattening each half into a disk. Place one of the disks between two pieces of parchment paper and use a rolling pin to roll out to about ¼ inch thick (between ⅛ and ¼ inch). Do the same with the other dough disk, and then place both pieces of dough between the parchment on a cookie sheet and into the fridge to chill for 20-30 minutes.
Make the filling: While the dough is chilling, make the filling. Place the chocolate chips and butter in a microwave-safe bowl. Melt in the microwave using 50% power for a minute at a time. Remove after each minute and mix with small wooden spoon or spatula. In my microwave, it took two minutes plus 10 extra seconds at full power.
Once the chocolate-butter mixture is completely smooth and shiny, add all the filling ingredients and mix well. Let this chocolate mixture cool down before filling the hamantaschen. Yields 1 cup.
Form and bake the cookies: Remove one dough piece from the refrigerator, grab your 2½- to 3-inch round cookie cutter, pull the top piece of parchment back and make cutouts in the dough — as many as you can. Remove the scraps and place the parchment with the round dough pieces on a cookie sheet.
Place a heaping teaspoon of the cooled filling in the center of each dough round (the filling is moldable, so you can form it into a flatter oval/round shape to make it look consistent in each cookie — not necessary but very fun).
Use your thumbs and forefingers to cinch the dough into a triangle, creating three corners, and firmly pinch them closed, leaving a hole for the filling to peek through.
Combine the scraps, reroll the dough, and refrigerate again. While that batch is chilling, work on the other half of the dough from the refrigerator. (Any dough scraps remaining after the “reroll” can be formed into traditional Mexican wedding cookie balls. You can even try making thumbprint style cookies if you want!)
Preheat oven to 375°F. Chill the formed cookies for 20-30 minutes, then bake at 375°F for 15 minutes. (If the dough is closer to ¼ inch thick, it might take a minute or two longer than if it’s closer to an ⅛ inch thick. Each oven is different, so start checking about 2 minutes early, at 13 minutes, just in case.
The underside of the cookies should take on some color, and the top edges may as well. If cooking two sheets at the same time, switch them halfway through baking.
Once removed from the oven, let the cookies cool in place on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes, then move to a cooling rack.
To serve, place the cookies on a serving tray of choice and dust with powdered sugar just like you would with a Mexican wedding cookie!
Notes: This may seem like a lot of steps, but it’s just the nature of hamantaschen. Remember, the dough and filling can be made ahead. Once you get into a rhythm, you’ll realize that while one batch is chilling, another batch can be forming and another batch can be baking.
Anytime the dough seems hard to work with, it’s probably just too warm. Pop it back in the fridge for 10 minutes or even the freezer for 5 minutes.
If you cinch up a hamantash and notice a crack or dent in the dough, or notice that one dough round is way thicker than another, just smooth over the crack or press down the lump. This dough is malleable.
If you make the filling ahead and it gets cold and hard, just reheat in the microwave at 50% power for at most a minute and check to see if it’s getting warm and soft again.
If you make the dough ahead (like hours or days) and roll it out as instructed, be sure to store the rolled-out dough airtight so it doesn’t dry out. Either cover the sheet pan, or store in a giant zipper bag. You can also store it as a disk and roll out later, but it’s nice to have it rolled out and ready to go.