Coconut Macaroons - Marking Passover over with Children

The older children made a couple of batches of vanilla and chocolate coconut macaroons from Lisa Rauchwerger's excellent, interactive family cookbook, Chocolate Chip Challah and Other Twists on the Jewish Table, as a quick nod to Passover.

Quick, because Passover began right at the height of the Easter celebration, this year, and the older children, because my younger children don't care for coconut.  Not that they couldn't have handled the recipe (click here to see a similar recipe from AllRecipes.com).

It only has three ingredients - four, for the chocolate version.

And, like all the recipes in the cookbook, it is written in a very easy to understand style, suitable for younger children working with adults.  The pages around the recipes, which follow the Jewish calendar through the year, are filled with historical factoids, Hebrew blessings, and personal family anecdotes from the author, making it a fun, and informative primer on the traditions, and customs of the Jewish holidays, as well as a family friendly cookbook.

I'm tempted to purchase a copy, just for the recipes alone.  But, I do like the history and facts, too. It's handy after reading a Biblical account of an event, to be able to say, "This is still being celebrated today, with recipes like this one."  As the children worked on the macaroons for instance, we discussed the lack of a leavening ingredient, and how that relates to Passover.

The recipe in the book calls for three cups of coconut (already slightly more than the AllRecipes.com version), but we found we needed to make it three "firmly packed" cups of coconut, even so, or the sweetened condensed milk didn't stay mixed with the coconut during baking, giving us results like this...

...rather than this (with the extra coconut).

Both batches were quite tasty though, and served as a simple backdrop for a discussion of Passover and another tie back into Easter.

Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 1 Corinthians 5:7

It's great to be a homeschooler.