It's Purim. The feast of Esther. A fun festival when we give baskets of food to everybody. Hamentaschen are a favorite. Triangular pastries representing the garb of the villain of the story which get gobbled down as we make noise to drown out his name. I received a Purim basket with a few crumbly cookie hamentaschen, which are good, but are very different the yeast dough ones everybody made when I was growing up. Today was (was going to be) a wild day and I knew I wasn't going to have time, but last night I was thinking about our late, beloved 2ManyDirversions, who was planning with me to make beignets to the point where she suggested that we end each forum post with the word "beignets". It was fun and silly and weird, and the memory brought the idea that it would only take a couple of hours to make them.

I found the buttermilk beignet recipe on Epicurious, while just looking for fluffy enough to stuff. (https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/buttermilk-beignets-356850, but a limited access site.)

I woke up in time. I was still tired, so put in 1.5 x the amount of baking soda, but the buttermilk was particularly acidy so I figured it would just make them fluffier. (They were really fluffy!) Instead of trying to stuff them with a pastry bag, I cut a little hole in the top, and spooned in the blueberry compote I made. (Thawed blueberries in their own juice (frozen from fresh), zest of a blood orange, big spoon of sugar, little slug of Cointreau.)

The recipe called for twice the powdered sugar that you think you need, but I used my sugar shaker and needed lots less than I'd thought. And, of course, I cut them into triangles. Since I was in a rush, I didn't bother with uniformity, and fried up the little ones from the ends as well as the "real" ones. I divided the dough into four manageable pieces. This also meant that if I ran into the time for my morning meeting, I could just put the rest in the fridge, but I did finish on time. To cut them, I made an oblong of dough, rested my rolling pin at the edge and used my resin marshmallow cutter (looks like a big pizza wheel with holes in it) along the rolling pin as a straight edge, and again on a 60° angle (by eyeball), then cut the diamonds across the middle, from obtuse angle to obtuse angle.

The recipe said that it took 20 minutes to heat the oil. I used safflower rather than the suggested peanut oil, but I think it's maybe induction rather than gas that didn't take nearly that (phew!). I wasn't that diligent on uniformity again, but they all came up a nice, dark brown, with a little snap but well short of a crunch. The insides are fluffy and soft with big bubbles, but a consistent texture--no breakage of the bubble walls. Very tasty but could have used a pinch more salt and sugar, or maybe some malt. The recipe said "bread flour", but I didn't want to go heavy, so I used Gold Medal Better for Bread.

They were a hit! The compote isn't very portable, so made a kit with a paper coffee cup of the compote to apply later. I had unstuffed "testers" for breakfast. :)

Happy Purim!