Alpha Bakers: Rugelach

Unlike some of my Alpha Baker friends, I get pretty excited when I see recipes containing raisins. I love raisins. I would happily order, eat, cook anything with raisins in it, sweet or savory. 

Of course now that I've declared my love of raisins, I will tell you that I ended up making 1/2 recipe of these Rugelach without raisins. I wanted to try something different but I could not decide whether to choose the Chocolate Raspberry or Cran-Raspberry so I made a mixture of both. Mine is Cran-Raspberry Chocolate. And as you will see from the step by step photos below, I did not use seedless raspberry jam - the one we have is seeded and I don't bother straining them.

Everyone I shared this with love them and I had fun trying to pronounce Rugelach, which to me sounds very similar to Arugula and at some point when someone asked what it is, I happily answered: "Arugula!"

I've made the rugelach from Rose's Christmas cookie book back in 2012 (you can read the post here). I don't remember any details about that experience, only that it was positive and yummy. As I re-read my post back then, written by Jenn circa 2012, it sounds like I was confused by the explanation to roll the dough into a circle. Well, I can proudly tell you guys that I am not confused about this anymore so I think we can safely say that 4 years of baking since then have paid off? :)

These arugula rugelach are easy to put together and very yummy. I love that I can make the dough ahead as I made it one day then it sat in the fridge for a couple days. The combo filling is really good too, I can taste a bit of everything, though I think the chocolate overpower the cranberries a bit even though I didn't use the full amount of chocolate pearls. I think next time if I use chocolate at all I will only put a couple of pearl in each rugelach.

Before we get into the step by step photos, I want to share some photos from our yard. Our crab apple tree is blooming. This was taken a couple of weeks ago on a Friday, the day before we got dumped with 20 inches (yes 20 inches!) of wet spring snow storm over a weekend.

And the next day, our crab apple tree looks like this.

And this past weekend, our tulips bloomed!

Step by step photos:

Cream cheese and butter.

Creamed.

Add sugar, vanilla, and flour.

Wrap in plastic for storage.

Mis-en-place the filling. Blurry chocolate pearls on upper left, sugar and cinnamon mixture on the upper right, chopped almonds, and cranberries (soaked in hot water and drained).

Dough rolling!

I tried hard not to make a strange island this time. You can see some patching on the right and on the top but it's mostly circular.

Applied seeded raspberry jam, sprinkle the cinnamon sugar.

Then sprinkle almonds and cranberries.

Then choc pearls. This looks like Christmas wreath to me!

Sliced into somewhat evenly parts.

Rolled up then brush with almond milk and sprinkle with more cinnamon sugar.

Alpha Bakers is a group of bakers who are baking through The Baking Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum's latest cookbook. Come check out the rest of the group at Rose's Alpha Bakers.