You can only go right with cookies made from tehina. So good with black tea or a cup of milk.
You won’t be able to keep these halvah-like cookies around for long. And they couldn’t be simpler to make.
We never thought to use tehina (or tehini as you might know it) in baking, but this recipe produces the most meltingly delicious cookies you can imagine.
If you’re looking for ways to use up your flour before the Jewish Passover holiday coming up, try them. It takes only 25 minutes and six steps from raw ingredients to placing them in the cookie jar. Advice: hide a few for yourself before they disappear.
Tehina Cookies Recipe
Yield: about 3 dozen cookies
Ingredients:
200 grams soft margarine or butter
1 cup sugar
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup tehina. If there’s a layer of oil floating on top of the jar, stir in back in.
2 cups plus 4 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
Optional: 2 tbsp. pine nuts and powdered sugar
Method:
Preheat the oven to 160 C – 325 F.
1. Cream the margarine and the sugar together.
2. Add the vanilla and the tehina and blend again.
3. Combine the flour and the baking powder; add to the tehina mixture.
4. Form balls the size of walnuts and place them on a greased baking sheet. The dough is dry and crumbly, so squeeze it together to make the balls.
If adding the optional pine nuts, do it like this: form one cookie ball; take 2 or 3 pine nuts into your left palm, and with your right hand, press the ball onto them. Reverse it onto the baking sheet. If the ball crumbles slightly, just squeeze it back into shape with your fingertips.
Bake for 13-15 minutes. Do not bake longer. The cookies need a little moisture to retain their shape and not crumble. Cool the baking tray on a rack, and don’t touch the cookies for at least 5 minutes. If they’re handled while hot, they will fall apart.
Dust with powdered sugar when they’re cool.
Enjoy!
Other green-inspired recipes you’ll enjoy:
Photo of Tehina Cookies by Miriam Kresh
Author: Miriam Kresh
Miriam Kresh is an American ex-pat living in Israel. Her love of Middle Eastern food evolved from close friendships with enthusiastic Moroccan, Tunisian and Turkish home cooks. She owns too many cookbooks and is always planning the next meal. Miriam can be reached at miriam (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
Karin, I think that when you bake cookies, the idea is to provide pleasure. If you eat half the batch, you're asking for trouble of course. But health-conscious folks might reasonably eat a few and share the rest.
I wonder how many calories those cookies are packing? Tasty, but dangerous…