I've been spending a lot of time browsing through Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy lately. After a string of successful experiences with recipe from this cookbook, I was optimistic about Alice Medrich's recipe for "Meneinas" even though I didn't have any idea what to expect. I've never heard of a meneina (pronounced meh-NAY-na) cookie before. This recipe from Egypt appears in the "Gooey" section of the cookbook and includes a dough flavored with orange blossom water completely encasing a date-walnut filling (although Medrich offers some alternate filling options, including pear, spiced fig, apricot-vanilla, or sour cherry).
I made the date and walnut filling first. You combine pitted, chopped dates with butter, a pinch of salt, and tangerine zest in a saucepan (I didn't have tangerines so I used orange zest instead). The mixture was a little dry, so I added a squeeze of orange juice and then cooked the mixture and mashed it until it formed a smooth stiff paste. After taking it off the heat, I stirred in chopped walnuts and let the mixture cool.
To make the dough you beat softened butter and a little sugar until creamy; add milk and orange blossom water; and incorporate flour and baking powder. You can use the dough immediately or chill it for later use.
The recipe instructs you to pinch off pieces of dough (I used a #40 scoop to portion it out), roll each piece into a ball, and flatten the dough to form a bowl that you wrap around a ball of filling (I used a #50 scoop to portion out the filling). I got 17 hefty cookies from a batch of dough. I found it very difficult to enclose the filling inside the dough. While the dough was soft and pliable, it had absolutely no elasticity, so whenever I pinched together the dough to try and seal a crack, a new crack would open up somewhere else.
I found it frustrating that there was no photo of this cookie in the cookbook, because the recipe says that you can leave the cookies round or "press the sides of the cookies all around to form the traditional beehive shape." I would have loved to have had a visual reference for what the traditional beehive shape is supposed to look like. I made my best guess and also used some small round cookie cutters to imprint concentric circles on my domes of dough.
I baked the cookies until they were golden, which took 22 minutes. As you can see in the photo above, some of the cookies had cracks and there are also small smudges of filling in many places on the outside of the cookies because it was so difficult to cleanly enclose all of it inside the cookie dough. After the cookies cooled slightly, I sifted over some powdered sugar; the recipe says they should be totally dredged in powdered sugar, but I wanted to preserve the visibility of the beehive lines.
I don't know what to make of these cookies. To me, everything about them was just odd. I didn't like the uneven appearance of the finished cookies. The orange blossom flavor was strong in the dough, and it was too floral for my taste. The cookie portion was very crumbly and unpleasantly dry (that's why there are so many crumbs on the plate in the photo directly above, even though I used a very sharp knife to cut through the cookie), which was surprising given that there is so much butter in the dough. I did like the date-walnut filling. But overall this cookie didn't do anything for me. And filling and shaping the cookies was so tedious that I'll be happy to never revisit this recipe again.
Recipe: "Meneinas" from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich.
I made the date and walnut filling first. You combine pitted, chopped dates with butter, a pinch of salt, and tangerine zest in a saucepan (I didn't have tangerines so I used orange zest instead). The mixture was a little dry, so I added a squeeze of orange juice and then cooked the mixture and mashed it until it formed a smooth stiff paste. After taking it off the heat, I stirred in chopped walnuts and let the mixture cool.
To make the dough you beat softened butter and a little sugar until creamy; add milk and orange blossom water; and incorporate flour and baking powder. You can use the dough immediately or chill it for later use.
The recipe instructs you to pinch off pieces of dough (I used a #40 scoop to portion it out), roll each piece into a ball, and flatten the dough to form a bowl that you wrap around a ball of filling (I used a #50 scoop to portion out the filling). I got 17 hefty cookies from a batch of dough. I found it very difficult to enclose the filling inside the dough. While the dough was soft and pliable, it had absolutely no elasticity, so whenever I pinched together the dough to try and seal a crack, a new crack would open up somewhere else.
I found it frustrating that there was no photo of this cookie in the cookbook, because the recipe says that you can leave the cookies round or "press the sides of the cookies all around to form the traditional beehive shape." I would have loved to have had a visual reference for what the traditional beehive shape is supposed to look like. I made my best guess and also used some small round cookie cutters to imprint concentric circles on my domes of dough.
Recipe: "Meneinas" from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your Mouth Cookies by Alice Medrich.
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