TWD: Rugelach

For your consideration: Rugelach from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 150-151 featured this week on Tuesdays with Dorrie.

For my rugelach, I used Sweet Potato Butter (with Honey) that I picked up during last week’s apple orchard/farm stand trek to the North Georgia Mountains (post to follow – yes I’m behind… again). Since I’m not a big fan of cooked raisins, I simply left those out.

I followed the recipe and did the radial/pizza wedge method described in Dorie’s book first. Disaster. If you want to try this particular method, use LOTS of flour to dust the counter, don’t roll the dough too thin and work very quickly so that your dough doesn’t warm up too much. I had to use my handy dandy offset spatula once again (it’s quickly becoming one of my top 5 favorite utensils, previously relegated to the bottom strata of one of my drawers) to scrape them each off the counter, jimmying them up with an edge of flour. My chunkies were too chunky and didn’t cut well with the pizza cutter and the dough tore up a little.

For the second half of the dough I decided to actually go look at the TWD P&Q area for this recipe. (No, I have no idea – maybe Posts and Questions? Mind your P's & Q's?) EVERYONE had a grand time with these and nobody’s fused to the counter like mine did. I did check out one of the links posted there that sent me to Martha’s website where she had a video of 2 gals making these for their bakery. They did the jellyroll pinwheel thing. Hey, if it works for Martha, it works for me. Well, sort of. My dough didn’t stick to the counter this time, having learned that lesson, and I also made them on my non-stick silicone baking mat. They were sort of crumbly anyway, but they did look reasonably better than the pseudo-crescents however. I dusted them with Turbinado sugar, maybe too much sugar though because it got runny and caramelized all over the baking sheet.

I liked this recipe and these tasted amazingly good. I'm sharing my cook's notes/trial and errors with you so you can learn from my experiences. I’m just frustrated with myself for not fully mastering the execution of it. If attempted it a few more times, I might get the technique right. These tasted great but looked less than beautiful. I took them to school and once I talked everyone past their homeliness, they got rave reviews.

Thanks to Piggy of Piggy’s Cooking Journal for choosing this recipe. To see what all the other TWDers did with this recipe, check out the blogroll here. If you'd like to try making Dorie’s Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes for yourself, you can find the recipe on our hostesses blog, or in Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours.

POSTSCRIPT:
Do not wait until the last minute to make next week's TWD.

It takes HOURS / DAYS. Please read the recipe completely, and a Bundt pan works fine.