Rugelach is this week's Tuesdays with Dorie pick, chosen by Grace of
Piggy's Cooking Journal. They are essentially dough
crescent rolls with jam/chocolate/nuts/etc filling. They are excellent. Please either get the recipe from
Baking from my Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan, or check out the recipe from
Piggy's Cooking Journal. I chose to use shaved bittersweet chocolate, cinnamon sugar, blackberry and raspberry jam, and chopped pecans. I pretty much followed the recipe...but I wasn't too precise on amounts for the filling and I just spooned out the cream cheese to what I thought 4 ounces would be.
This was the week of "make do with what you have". I came home from work yesterday and we just didn't want to go back out to the grocery store. Yes maybe we should have gone before we got home, but we forgot. Which lead to me making
Rugelach with what I had on hand....which turned out to be about 1 ounce of regular cream cheese and 3 ounces of strawberry cream cheese to make up the total 4 ounces of regular cream cheese I should have used. And you might be thinking, well that sounds good...I mean the filling has fruit base in it as well. But what you might not realize is that I am not a strawberry flavoring fan. I love strawberries, but almost can't stand anything with strawberry flavoring.
Also...I don't have a food processor. But I tried to do the same effect with my
KitchenAid slicer attachment. It worked...more or less. I suppose I could have used the blender, but I didn't know if I would ever get the cream cheese and butter out of the bottom of the glass.
BUT as a testament to my laziness, I used the strawberry cream cheese. And it wasn't bad. The dough didn't puff like it should have, but I think that is because I misunderstood it when Dorie says to rotate your pan from top to bottom, front to back midway. I read it to mean that 1/4 way through you rotate it, 1/2 you put it on top, 3/4 you rotate again....so I think maybe opening the oven that many times didn't help me much.
Also you are supposed to heat up your jam on the stove. Well I wanted to use blackberry jam on half and raspberry on half...and didn't want to dirty up a pan just for that. So....
YES...I decided to microwave the jam. Which was not by downfall...it would have worked (and did work later on) but I just hit the 3 minute button thinking that I would stop it after it "
liquefied". But I forgot because I realized I didn't put flour on my mat before I rolled out my dough, so I was scraping it off again and redoing it... (I know...what is this the 10
th mistake I made so far???)....so I forgot. And 3 minutes later I hear the
fateful ding. And I know what horribleness that is in store. The glass bowl was not savable...the jam had formed sort of a rock hard molten sugar layer that would not come off once it cooled.
Alas, after all these
substitutions and mistakes....and the not puffing....the
rugelach were good. Both me and my husband ate one out of the oven and my husband thought they would be better cold. So this morning, fresh from the refrigerator we had another one each, and they are good. I think, personally, I would like them better using regular cream cheese...and if they were puffed...but they were good. My office-mates seemed to like them too :) Please check the
blogroll for everyone else that participated this week. From the pictures I have seen, they seemed to have better results :)
Up next week:
Kugelhopf on pages 61-63. I don't even know what this is, so it should be interesting, so check back next Tuesday :)
Okay...so I will let you in on a little secret...I didn't read the recipe through all the way before I started....turns out this is a very time intensive process. 1 1/2 hours for the first rise, 2 hrs (with 1/2 hr beating down of the dough) then chill in the refrigerator all night, and then a final rise out of the fridge for 2 more hours.
Now I will let you in on a second little secret...I would be lying if I said that I followed this recipe to a tee. So I started this recipe at about 9pm last night and I was uber tired. So I let it rise for about an hour and then "slapped it down" and put it in the fridge overnight. I probably would have skipped this challenge if I had read through the whole thing before starting it last night...but I figured that out after I had the dough.
So other than the rise times, I used chocolate chips in the dough instead of raisins, mainly because I didn't get a chance to go by the grocery store and get raisins...actually I had planned on putting dried cranberries in it instead. The chocolate chips were good in it, but they all sunk to the bottom of the dough.
The final result was okay. It would have probably been better if I had followed the rise times it probably would have been better. Also I think I agree with a lot of the TWDers that thought that this dough was a little bland. Probably worse though since my chocolate chips all fell to the bottom and were not spaced out as they should have been.
So here is my so-so Kugelhopf. I guess this is 2 recipes that haven't been so good...but I also don't have much experience with breads...so I think that it is still good that I am doing this whole weekly challenge thing, the main reason I wanted to join was to become a better baker...so sorry if you are looking at this blog for amazing results each time ;)
Next week's challenge is: Arborio Rice Pudding, White, Black (or Both) on pages 412 and 413. But I probably will chose to skip this week...1. because I am not much of a pudding fan and 2. because I have a "midterm" next Tuesday (yes...you heard me right, a midterm within the last 3 class days this semester...ridiculous). Check on the TWD blog for everyone else's pudding.
