Egyptian Date Crescents #CreativeCookieExchange

These melt-in-your-mouth shortbread crescents are filled with sweet and sticky dates then covered in powdered sugar. 

My Creative Cookie Exchange group is celebrating spring around the world today, with recipes for Easter, Purim, Passover and more. Searching online for cookie recipes is often a rabbit hole of no return, but I managed come back this time with these Egyptian date crescents that the author said she and her mother always made for her father for Easter.  In fact, Easter is celebrated in a big way in Egypt, which surprised me when we lived in Cairo. The Coptic Christians are a minority, but they are a very vocal and visible influence in life there, where they live side by side, for the most part quite peaceably, with their Muslim neighbors.

Adapted from What She’s Having.

Ingredients - makes 2 dozen cookies
7 oz or 200g whole dates
2 cups or 250g flour
1 cup or 225g  butter at room temp, cut into pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup or 60ml cold milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup or 94g powdered sugar

Method
In a small bowl, cover the dates with hot but not boiling water and set aside.

Using a pastry blender to combine the butter and flour and salt until they form large crumbles and there are no large pieces of butter.

Add the vanilla to the milk. Then add the milk to the butter and flour.

Stir until well combined. The dough is going to be quite sticky. If you live in a warm climate, wrap in cling film and leave to rest in the refrigerator for about 10-15 minutes. Don’t leave it too long or the butter will stiffen up and the dough will no longer be pliable.

Drain the dates and remove the pits and any little stemmy bits on the one end.

Use a sharp knife to chop the dates finely. Use the edge of the knife to make a square out of the date paste and cut it into 24 pieces.

Preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C and prepare two cookie sheets by lining them with baking parchment or silicone liners.

Cut the dough into 24 squares.

Taking one square at a time, form it into a ball.

Press the center of the ball down to create an indent and press it out into an oval. Place one piece of the dates into the middle.

Close the dough up over the dates.

Roll the dough gently between your hand to lengthen it. Bend into a crescent.

Place on your prepared cookie sheet.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the bottom of the cookies are just golden. Let cool completely.

Roll in icing sugar.

Enjoy!

Check out all the lovely spring cookies we are sharing today!

• Chocolate Candy Coconut Cookies from Magnolia Days
• Easter Biscuits from Baking in Pyjamas
• Easter Egg Cookies from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Egyptian Date Crescents from Food Lust People Love
• Lemon Hamantaschen from Spiceroots
• Lemon Meltaway Cookies from A Baker's House
• Ma'amoul – Date Stuffed Cookies from All That's Left Are The Crumbs
• Malt M&M's Easter Cookies from Hezzi-D's Books and Cooks
• Maltese Figolli Cookies from Upstate Rambling
• Peach and Pistachio Frangiapane Hamantaschen from Live Bake Love
• Persian Chickpea Cookies (Nan e Nokhodchi) from Flours and Frostings
• Taralli Dolci di Pasqua (Southern Italian Easter Cookies) from The Spiced Life
• Zesty Citrus Bar Cookies from 2 Cookin' Mamas

Creative Cookie Exchange is hosted by Laura of The Spiced Life, this month with technical assistance from Anshie of Spiceroots. We get together once a month to bake cookies with a common theme or ingredient so Creative Cookie Exchange is a great resource for cookie recipes. Be sure to check out our Pinterest Board and our monthly posts at The Spiced Life). We post the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!

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Lemon Mint Juice

When I arrived to live in Egypt eight months ago, it was cold!  Much colder than I expected.  The heater in our house didn’t work properly and I baked just to keep the oven on to warm the kitchen.  I drank a lot of tea and coffee to warm myself from the inside and I wore my new Marks & Spencer cardigan every single day, with fuzzy slippers inside and shoes with socks when I went outside.  It was quite the fashion statement.  As the year wore on, winter gradually disappeared and summer took its place.  Our evenings are still pleasant but during the daytime, a refreshing drink hits all the right spots.  If it’s summer in your part of the world right now, you will enjoy Egypt’s traditional drink made with lemon and fresh mint.  It’s one of my favorite things and is so easy to make. 

Ingredients for two refreshing glasses

1 large lemon

Handful of fresh mint (or more if you prefer)


1/4 cup or 60ml simple syrup 

Ice for blending and serving

Method

Pick the leaves off of your bunch of mint and rinse well in a salad spinner.  Spin to dry.  Put your mint in a blender.

Peel the lemon and use a sharp knife to cut it into chunks, making sure to leave behind the white parts that separate the pegs of lemon.  Add the lemon chunks to the blender.

Add in your simple syrup and another 1/4 cup or 60ml of water. 

Put in a few cubes of ice.  Blend until completely liquid. 

Serve over more ice.

Enjoy!

Sambusaks or Cheese-filled Buttery Pastries

Sambusaks are a traditional cheese-filled buttery pastry popular in Egypt. Filled with crumbly feta cheese, the tender pastry melts in your mouth. Serve them with hot sweet cardamom tea or a completely untraditional glass of wine.

Everybody has a story to tell.  Some tell it with words and some tell it with illustrations.  (And some keep it to themselves, but they still have a story.  I’m sure of it.)  Right after cookbooks, my favorite kind of book is an autobiography.  (And my favorite cookbooks are never straight recipes.  They need some personal stuff too.)  I will read anyone’s autobiography, from Winston Churchill to Tina Fey and Corrie Ten Boom to David Sedaris.  The little old lady down the street?  If she can write well, I will read hers too.  You never know what interesting thing is going on behind closed doors.

An autobiography and its often more colloquial twin sister, the memoir, reach deep into the heart of what makes the author tick.  How we were raised, where we lived, what we were exposed to in childhood:  These are the circumstances that make us who we are.  Without debating the nature vs. nurture argument, even while leaning heavily to one side, a reasonable person would have to admit that neither nature nor nurture can be completely discounted in the formation of young minds.  And we have all heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” 

So, along with my love of cookbooks and autobiographies, I have recently developed an appetite for memoirs that share recipes.  The perfect marriage of both my loves.   

And you know what’s dangerous?  Buy now with 1-Click:  Kindle books on my iPad.

But yesterday’s purchase was money well spent! (Aren’t they all?)  After all, I am trying to get to know my new home city, right?  It is called Apricots on the Nile, a lovely book by an articulate author, Colette Rossant, and it's all about her childhood centered around the consolation of cooking and food in her grandparents’ home in Cairo’s Garden City, way back in the 1930s and ‘40s.  What a delight it was to read about Cairo in a different age but with traditional recipes I am still seeing today.  I highlighted just about every recipe and can’t wait to try them all.

Sambusaks or Cheese-filled Buttery Pastries

This is an easy recipe that I would have highlighted twice, if Kindle for iPad permitted such a thing.

Ingredients

For the pastry:

1/4 cup or 55g melted butter

1/4 cup or 60ml canola oil

1/4 cup or 60ml hot water

Pinch of salt

1 1/2 cups or 355g flour plus extra for rolling out dough

For the filling:

5 1/2 oz 156g feta cheese

2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

1 egg

2 teaspoons baking powder

Black pepper

Method

Put the melted butter, oil and hot water in a bowl with the pinch of salt. 

Add in the flour and mix well.  Knead for a few minutes then wrap in cling film and pop the dough in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, crumble your feta cheese with a fork or your fingers.  

Add in the Parmesan, freshly ground black pepper, egg and the baking powder.  Mix well.   

The original recipe said to whip it all up in a food processor so that’s what I did with my first batch of filling.  And then I started over.

Runny filling going down the drain!

Just mix it by hand. 

When the 30 minutes waiting time is almost up for the dough, preheat your oven to 375°F or 190°C.   Grease your baking tray or line it with parchment paper.

Get the flour ready, because this dough is pretty soft and sticky.  Cut the dough in half and then cut each half into five equal pieces.

Flour your rolling pin and the counter top.  Shape the piece of dough into a ball and then gentle roll it out into a circle of about 4 inches or 10cm. 

Place about 1 tablespoon of the filling on the circle.  

Fold over and squeeze the air out.  Then press the sides together. 

If you have enough room, roll the edges up slightly and then press with a fork to decorate.  I followed the original instructions and just used the fork to close the joint.  (Check out the update at the end for pictures of this.) Some of my cheese filling melted out so folding the edges over might help prevent that.

Continue until all 10 sambusaks are assembled. 

Bake in your preheated oven about 25 minutes or until they are golden brown.  I was amazed by how light and flakey these were. 

Enjoy!

The salty cheese filling goes great with a glass of red. 

Update and confession:  I really only made four of the 10 sambusaks that day.  Yesterday, I used the remaining dough and filling - and added some thinly sliced ham - and they were just as delicious, if not more so.  I also followed my own suggestion of folding the edges over before crimping with the fork and it worked!