Just Baking

Several years ago, when I was in high school, I worked at a little gourmet deli in a very well-known town. We had a sandwich station, of course, and perhaps 8 or 10 barrels filled with different types of coffee beans that customers could grind themselves, and the owner/chef made all her own salads, sauces, and soups. It was altogether very charming.

Opposite the deli counter stood the bakery case, where thick slices of iced poppyseed and marble cake stood next to piles of airy scones, softball-sized muffins, crackle-crusted hard rolls, and some of the best rugelach in the county. And up until recently, that was the extent of my experience with rugelach - those apricot and walnut pastry rolls that flew out of our store as fast as we could stock them, it seemed.

When I found myself with several pounds of cream cheese on hand, I set off on a search for ways to use it up before it expired. Sure, there were conventional recipes - but I didn’t really want to do a cheesecake, and after I’d made eggplant rollatini and coffee cakes and countless cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, I was intrigued by a recipe I found in Dorie Greenspan’s epic Baking: From My Home to Yours, a rugelach pastry that required cream cheese. Why not? I thought. I gathered my ingredients and set off.

The recipe isn’t complicated, but there are certain steps that will make the process and the end result much more pleasant.

• The dough is quite soft and sticky. Be sure to flour your surfaces and use waxed paper when rolling out the dough.
• The dough triangles will be easier to handle if you don’t roll them too thin, but the thinner the pastry layer, the more pleasing the texture of the rugelach will be once it is baked. Experiment with rolling your dough as thin as possible; practice makes perfect!
• Per Dorie’s suggestion, a pizza wheel works beautifully for cutting the dough - be sure to use a plastic wheel if you are cutting on a silicone mat.
• Chop your nuts and chocolate into small bits to make rolling the crescents easier.

I used seedless raspberry jam, chopped Ghirardelli baking chocolate (60 percent), omitted the called-for currants, and chose walnuts over almonds. Feel free, though, to eliminate the chocolate if you wish, or to vary the flavor of jam and type of nuts. Experimenting with these ingredients is half the fun!   

The exact recipe, which appears on pages 150-152 of Baking: From My Home to Yours, can be found online here, along with some of Dorie’s cookie-baking tips.

Photos by me.