Gastronomy612′s Weblog

Rugelach is just about the most adorable little pastry (with the exception of course of petits fours).  It is not only cute, but it’s fillings are limitless.  Wikipedia explains that rugelach means “creeping vine”, but it also explains that it means “little twist” but I thought I read somewhere that it means “little horn.”  I’m so confused and don’t know what to believe, but I can tell you a few things about rugelach:

• It’s delicious
• It looks like a conjugal product between a croissant and a Pilsbury Crescent
• When you bake it, you need to double-pan it up.

Really, these are the most important things to know.  Oh, and here is the recipe from Ina Garten, one of few Food Network stars who is there based on merit and not how much cleavage she can show from a single camera angle.  Anyway…

You start out with a cream cheese based dough.  After mixing it in your mixing bowl knead it on the counter wit a little bit of flour until you can form it into a disk (like pie), wrap the dough in plastic and keep it in your refrigerator for at least an hour.  If you keep it in the refrigerator for more than an hour or a day, you may just need to take it out to warm up a bit before working with it – not a big deal.  When you can work with it, try using as little flour as you can while still having the ability to roll it out in a large circle since you don’t want/need to incorporate more flour than necessary in the dough.

I have a 14 inch round cake pan which I was able to use as a stencil and cut away any of the scraps.  I decided not to utilize the scraps in any future rugelach because I feared over-working the dough which, as we know, would result in a tough end-product – gross.

The, or, a school of thought on rugelach is that you have a wet ingredient and a dry one; apricot glaze and walnuts for instance, where you paint a layer of the glaze on the dough and then sprinkle it with nuts.

raspberry poppy and almond love

I followed that school in one batch, but got totally wild with the second batch where I merely chopped some bittersweet chocolate and combined it with nuts.  Like whoa.

As you can see, I did not cover all of the dough with filling but left room in the middle and on the outsides.

Because you will be rolling the dough and baking it, you certainly don’t want all of the delicious filling to go to waste when it bakes out of the middle.  Using a pizza cutter, or similar tool, cut the ingredient topped dough into triangles as you might a pizza.  The amount is really up to you and how large you rolled your dough out.  Then starting from out the outside and going in, roll each triangle into a croissant like shape.

You should see that I did not wrap each piece tightly.  It is a little loose so as to not squeeze out the ingredients as well as allow room for the dough to expand and puff out a bit during the baking process.  If at this point you want to freeze your rugelach to bake for later, you can.  They freeze nicely and you can take out as many or as few as you may need for a breakfast treat or a dessert table feature.  On this occasion, I baked half the batch and froze the other half, waiting until Thanksgiving to bake them.

When you DO  bake them, make sure to apply an egg wash (I prefer using a whole egg with a smidgen of milk, cream or whatever is on hand) and DOUBLE PAN your cookie sheets.  If you do not, the bottoms will burn before the tops look like they are finished.

Use the egg-wash as the glue that it is to sprinkle some of the filling on the tops of the rugelach so you and guests know what is inside the different little pastries!

If these little guys were animated, wouldn’t you just want to pinch their non-existent cheeks theyaresocute!?