If you’re a fan of mocha (coffee +chocolate) then these rugelach are sure to satisfy. These little cookies are for an adult palate. Not too sweet, almost pleasantly bitter from the intense coffee flavour.
I adore all coffee flavoured foods, especially coffee ice cream and coffee crisp chocolate bars! But I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was in my late 30’s. I always found the taste of plain coffee (even with milk and sugar) too intense. And then my friend Brigitte made me a big bowl filled with hot foamy steamed milk and just a bit of coffee. I was hooked. Over the years, the amount of coffee has increased and the milk has decreased, but I still think of her every morning when I’m frothing my milk.
These rugelach start with a flaky cream cheese dough, studded with instant coffee crystals, to really amp up the coffee flavour. Those brown streaks in the dough, in the photo above are Folgers Instant Coffee Crystals. It gets mixed into the dough, at the very end of the process, so that the dough stays prettily speckled.
Roll the dough into a circle and then cut it into wedges. Coat each triangle with a thin layer of mocha ganache and then sprinkle with hazelnut-chocolate streusel. Roll up into little crescents.
Brush with egg and bake. Enjoy with a latte. Any leftovers freeze perfectly.
My appreciation for walnuts has come to me relatively late in life. I used to hate them. Biting into a walnut always sent a shiver up and down my spine. But, as I have aged, I have come to appreciate the bitter nature of walnuts. That astringent note in walnuts comes from the tannins found in the paper-thin skin that covers the walnut.
That bitterness is a perfect counterpoint to all the sweet notes in these rugelach. The dough is tender and flaky, thanks to the addition of cream cheese. And, it rolls out so easily, no cracking. You can roll the dough into a circle and cut it into wedges for a crescent shaped rugelach, or you can roll it into a rectangle and roll it up into a log for circular cookies. Your choice. The video below shows both variations. I show you a neat little trick for getting your rugelach all exactly the same size.
The dough is spread with maple butter. Maple butter actually contains no butter. It is just maple syrup boiled until very thick and then whipped to a creamy spreadable consistency. Many supermarkets cary it or you can buy it online. Sometimes it is called maple cream.
The walnuts in the filling are candied first in maple syrup which is easily done in the oven. Complete directions are in the recipe. Brush them with egg white before they hit the oven.
And because we’re fancy around here, I glazed the finished rugelach with a maple-lemon glaze.
There are no shortage of Rugelach recipes recipes on this blog. Rugelach dough, rich with butter and cream cheese, is a great blank canvas. Then it’s time to have fun and create different flavour combos.
This one starts with making your own strawberry rhubarb jam. Store-bought is fine, but if you have an extra 20 minutes, this jam is stellar. I discovered this recipe from Jake Cohen over at thefeedfeed. Sweet and tart with a little pop of acidity from rice wine vinegar, you will find yourself putting this s##t on everything.
This dough rolls out like a dream. No cracking or splitting. It’s like velvet.
Each little wedge gets rolled, starting at the fat end and ending at the point.
Brush with egg and bake.
While they are baking, crush some freeze dried strawberries into a fine powder and mix with granulated sugar. As soon as the rugelach are baked, spoon some strawberry sugar over the rugelach. Once they are cool, give them a second dusting. If you have never tried freeze dried berries, you must seek them out. Many natural/health food stores carry them, as do Trader Joes and Whole Foods. They are a concentrated punch of colour and flavour that will elevate any baked good.
When the adorable Molly wrote about Rugelach filled with rhubarb jam, she kind of blew my mind. First of all, I adore rhubarb. What a brilliant idea to stuff it into buttery flaky rugelach dough. Secondly, you can make jam out of rhubarb? How did I not know that?
As I read through Molly’s recipe, I was surprised by her addition of 2 eggs to the dough. Traditional rugelach dough does not contain eggs. I was curious to see what the addition of eggs would do to the dough.
Battle rugelach was on. I made two batches. The first used Molly’s dough, with eggs, and the second was my favourite rugelach dough from Mindy Segal, without eggs. I had a statistically significant sample group of 5 taste testers, (my family), and the decision was unanimous. While eggs play a vital role in many baking projects, they have no business cracking their way into rugelach dough. We all found that the texture of the dough with the eggs was far too tender and puffy. Plus, the eggy taste overwhelmed the tanginess of the cream cheese in the dough.
The second change I made was to add a few tablespoons of raspberry jam to the rhubarb jam. I liked the colour and taste of the combined filling better. I thought that rhubarb jam would be hard to find but several stores here in Ottawa carried the Bonne Maman brand.
I have used the slice and roll method for forming my rugelach. The delicate crescent shape is very pretty. Although the crescent shape is a bit more work, I prefer it to the roll and slice method, where the dough is rolled up jellyroll style and cut.
Check out my video to see how it all comes together.
https://youtu.be/qVg1pGBPEro
Rich and nutty pistachios provide a great contrast to the tart raspberry-rhubarb filling. It’s a great flavour combo. These little cookies pack a big flavour punch.
Finished with a flurry of icing sugar, these rugelach are sure to become a favourite at your house.
According to my sister Bo, if I post any more of Melissa Clark‘s recipes I will be veering dangerously close into stalker territory. We both have a bit of a girl crush on Melissa. She is pretty awesome. To date, I have posted 9 of her recipes on my blog. I think that 10 is the line I must not cross or the restraining order will be shortly forthcoming.
Not to worry Melissa, I have a new girl crush. Her name is Mindy Segal. Although her book, Cookie Love, was released in 2015, for some reason, I just discovered it last month. Which, for a cookie fanatic like me, is kind of surprising. Mindy has turned the cookie world on it’s ear, taking the classics and updating them into fun and most decidedly delicious little bites.
Deciding which cookie to bake first, from this gem of a book, was not easy. As you can see, I have bookmarked lots.This is not a book for those looking for simple mix and scoop cookies. Many of the recipes in this book involve multiple steps and several “mini recipes” within a recipe. If that sort of thing bugs you, then this is not the book for you. If you are looking to up your cookie game, and enjoy spending time in the kitchen, creating little master pieces, then look no further, you have found your guru.
I decided to start with her cinnamon brickle rugelach. Rugelach, for the uninitiated, are a small Jewish pastry, of Eastern European origin. You can learn more about the history of rugelach in this post.
For these cookies you need to make a cream cheese dough, cinnamon nut brickle, and caramel sauce. All three of these components can be done several days ahead and you can assemble and bake the rugelach on another day if you like.
I started with the caramel sauce. Mindy’s recipe makes a generous 4 cups, and you really only need about 1/4 of this amount for the rugelach. But the caramel sauce keeps in the fridge for 6 months and it’s always a good idea to have some caramel sauce around in case of emergency. I don’t know about your emergencies, but some of mine can be resolved with a spoonful of salted caramel sauce. You can of course buy caramel sauce in a jar, but please don’t. Homemade is so much better. While the caramel sauce is cooling, make the cream cheese dough.This is a supple dough, easy to roll, with no cracking. Mindy suggests you roll it into a rectangle and then cut it into triangles. I read her instructions for doing this 3 times and could not figure it out. Geometry was never my strong suit. I decided to form mine into a circle, and used a 13 inch round plate to make my circle perfect, because that’s how we roll around here.
The dough needs to chill for about 30 minutes before you can make the rugelach, so go on to the cinnamon nut brickle. Brickle refers to something with little elasticity; hence it is easily cracked or fractured or snapped. Does anyone else remember Butter Brickle Ice Cream from their childhood? My mom used to buy the “light” version and we’d end up eating twice as much.
We’re essentially making nut toffee here. Butter, sugar and cinnamon are heated until melted. Mixed salted nuts are coated in this concoction and then tipped out onto a baking sheet to harden.Then get out the food processor and make some noise. There will be leftover brickle after forming your rugelach. It will keep for over a month, and is excellent on yogurt or ice cream, in case of another emergency.Now for some fun.
I altered Mindy’s recipe slightly, using less caramel sauce and less brickle than she does. A pastry wheel or pizza cutter make quick work of forming the wedges. You could also use a sharp knife. Make sure you brush with beaten egg whites so that the cinnamon sugar will stick. Mindy topped her rugelach with more brickle, but I found that most of it just fell off and burned on the baking sheet, so I left that step out. I did however, sprinkle them lightly with flaked sea salt (Maldon), before baking. The salt really balances out the sweetness of the caramel sauce and brickle filling. The rugelach will ooze quite a bit of their filling so don’t be alarmed. Those little pools of ooze will harden into a delicious toffee. Keep a ring of the toffee around each rugelach for a more delicious treat.
If the title of this post has left you shaking your head, wondering what the heck I am writing about, let me enlighten you.I wrote about cookie butter last year. It is also known as Speculoos or Biscoff spread. Basically, we are talking about ground up spicy gingerbread cookies, mixed with additional sugar and oil, to create, a somewhat addictive spread, in the vein of peanut butter and Nutella.
Rugelach is a small Jewish pastry, of Eastern European origin. Traditionally they are made in the form of a crescent by rolling a triangle of dough around a filling. The origin of the name comes from the Polish word “Rog” which is the prefix for horn, (croissant shaped pastries kind of look like horns). “El” is used as a diminutive and the “Ach” ending indicates plural. So put together we have horn shaped little pastries –Rugelach.How this little cookie came to be made in a crescent shape is an interesting story. I have read several versions, but this is my favourite. In the 16th Century, the Jews were living under the rule of the brutal Ottoman Empire. Life was not easy for them. A baker with a warped sense of humour, decided to create little pastries, shaped like the crescent that decorated the Ottoman war flags. With every bite of these delicious little noshes, the Jews imagined that they were “chewing out” their merciless oppressors.
Back in Europe, the dough for rugelach is light, airy and yeast raised. Somehow, when it arrived in North America, it transformed into a dense cream cheese based dough. This is the rugelach I grew up with and love. Rich and flaky, but not too sweet, the best rugelach let the dough be the star and the fillings play a supporting role.
Most often they are filled with jam, cinnamon-sugar, raisins and nuts. Often chocolate is thrown into the mix. Screwing with a 500 year old cookie could be a dangerous thing, but I like to live on the edge, so I played around with the traditional recipe and spread mine with Cookie Butter instead of jam.
The dough is simple to put together. I used the recipe from Cook’s Illustrated for the dough, with the addition of some cinnamon and ground ginger to mimic the gingerbread flavour of the cookie butter. The butter and cream cheese must be very cold.Only process the dough until it resembles small curd cottage cheese. Don’t let the processor form the dough into a ball, or you will have tough rugelach. I decided to make two varieties. The first, shaped in the traditional crescent, featured Cookie Butter and toasted chopped hazelnuts.These got treated to a shower of cinnamon sugar as soon as they came out of the oven. For the second variation I created little roulades. The dough was rolled into a rectangle, filled with cookie butter and chopped chocolate, and rolled and sliced, before baking.
