Raspberry Chocolate Rugelach

Dec 9

Dec 9 Raspberry Chocolate Rugelach

I made this raspberry rugelach recipe from New York Times Cooking last year and just loved the sweet, bite size cookies. The traditional shape reminded me of the rugelach that my mom served during Hanukkah (the first night, always a formal dinner in the dining room with a white tablecloth). She made hers with a cinnamon sugar and nut filling. Sadly I don’t have her recipe, so I made the NYT recipe again with just a few tweaks to suit my taste. I’m not a fan of currents, and I love toasted nuts, so these are crisp pastry filled with raspberry jam, bittersweet chocolate, toasted pecans, and diced dried cranberries. I mean, you can’t really go wrong with those flavors, can you?

The steps are straightforward: Make a simple dough (with cream cheese, yum!) and while it’s chilling prep the filling. Then roll out the chilled dough, spread the filling across it, slice the topped dough into wedges, roll up the wedges, then bake. The pastry dough is soft and easy to roll out, though if you let it get too soft, it can be tricky to roll up into neat crescents. I found it went mostly smoothly if I put the rolled out dough once topped and sliced back in the refrigerator to firm back up for about 10 minutes before rolling the individual cookies up. I hope that makes sense! Rolling out the dough on top of a piece of parchment makes all of this transporting in and out of the refrigerator easier.

Other than that, I recommend dicing any filling you use VERY small to keep the filling contained, and take the instruction to just spread a “thin gloss” of jam seriously or you’ll end up with jam spilling out everywhere. I hope you enjoy. They’re great at room temperatures but I think best a little warm from the oven.