This week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Rugelach, a Jewish pastry that's named for its traditionally crescent shape (it translates to "little twist" in Yiddish - thank you wikipedia). Before this I'd never had rugelach (I'd never even heard of it), but now that my eyes have been opened, my baking horizons expanded, my days of rugelach ignorance are over (thank goodness).
The original recipe in Baking With Julia calls for a traditional dried fruit and nut filling, held in place by an apricot or prune butter (a.k.a. Lekvar). I made the rugelach recipe from the book exactly as written (I even made both the prune and apricot lekvar recipes to use for my filling), with the exception of the shape (I rolled the cookies into crescents rather than the rounds that the book calls for) and the amount (I halved the recipe).
It was a long process and when all was said and done, I found that I really didn't care for the fruit rugelach. It was too sweet, too sticky, too much. Mine didn't even come out looking like cookies; between the epic amount of filling and the sugar/nut topping, by the time they came out of the oven they just looked like big mounds of sugary dough. I don't need my dessert to be pretty for me to enjoy it, but these cookies were seriously so unattractive that I couldn't even bring myself to photograph them!
It was a long process and when all was said and done, I found that I really didn't care for the fruit rugelach. It was too sweet, too sticky, too much. Mine didn't even come out looking like cookies; between the epic amount of filling and the sugar/nut topping, by the time they came out of the oven they just looked like big mounds of sugary dough. I don't need my dessert to be pretty for me to enjoy it, but these cookies were seriously so unattractive that I couldn't even bring myself to photograph them!
Onto round 2. When I saw on the TWD page that some people were trying Nutella variations, I knew I had to give these cookies a second chance with this fail-safe filling before I wrote them off completely. I made the same cream cheese pastry dough from the original recipe, but used the Nutella filling recipe from here. HOLY CRAP. These were a completely different breed of cookie. Instead of soft, crumbly and mushy, these were flaky, almost puff-pastry-like, and sweet, but not too sweet. I don't even have the words to describe how good these were. And they were a hundred times easier to make than the fruit ones! Please make these as soon as possible so we can marvel at their deliciousness together.
The original recipe can be found on this week's hosts' blogs, here and here, as well as in the Baking With Julia book.