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.

Alpha Bakers: Luxury Oatmeal Cookies

May I present:

my leaning tower of cookies.

These cookies are very sturdy. Yes they are. Why do I say that? Sturdy is not really a word you would associate with cookies. And it's not a very good word. I would think that if someone refers to cookies as sturdy maybe it means they are hard like rock and therefore unedible.

These cookies are amazing. They are chewy and yummy and I would totally make them again and again.

They are sturdy because while I was trying to take photos of my leaning tower of cookies, they fell 8 times. 8 times! The bottom 2 cookies stayed put, the other 6 fell over and over again.

Alpha Bakers: Caramel Buns, round 2

This is a redo of the caramel buns. I made another 1/2 recipe of the brioche and the caramel. The purpose is to try to redo the caramel. This time I paid attention and not suffering from ADD or KDD (knitting deficit disorder) or distracted with other things while the caramel is cooking. I had the heavy cream in the microwave ready to go. Even punched in 20 seconds on the microwave keypad thingy for the the cream, all I gotta do is press start. I have the butter soft, kitchen thermometer, pyrex cup sprayed with cooking spray, all next to me. Once the sugar mixture started turning a bit brown I stood watch, then heat up the cream, measure the temperature on the sugar mixture, it's 340'F - I took it off the heat (not just turn off the heat but actually moved the pot to the side - thought I'd clarify, having read earlier Michelle hilarious rendition of conversation with her husband). I poured the heavy cream onto the pot, it is bubbling super furiously (sorry no photo, tried to concentrate to much), put it back on the heat and mix until all is blended. Then poured into the pyrex cup and it's still liquid, no toffee in sight. The butter must be too soft because as soon as I add it to the caramel, it melts quick and won't blend (arrghh!) I then nuked the whole thing, probably too long because it then bubbled. When I add the vanilla it went nuts (first time seeing vanilla boiling....). And then onto cooling, well they still look liquid. I was still dancing hurrah, and then 15 seconds after adding them to onto all the buns, they are TOFFEE!!!!!!!!! what the hell?!?

I think next time (yes there's next time) I should just make the toffee caramel. At least I'm getting practice for Christmas cookie baking!

I am going to serve this with warning, please nuke it and eat at own risk. I am not gonna be held responsible for any damage to dentures.

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.

Click here for a full listing of all the recipes we are baking.

Alpha Bakers: Caramel Buns

These are fantastic. They are better than anything I have ever had or have ever made. They are not too sweet, even with the caramel on top. The fillings taste wonderful - the rum-soaked raisins really adds to the taste.

I keep thinking we are making cinnamon rolls or cinnamon buns because of the photo on page 473. I've made cinnamon rolls several times and that photo reminds me of it (sans the mason jar in the middle). But no, we're making caramel buns, which is basically sticky buns, or a fancy cinnamon rolls is how I think of it. We first make a brioche a day ahead. Anything that uses brioche is fancy, especially Rose's brioche. It's airy and soft and has a very nice taste. I've made the version in Bread Bible several times in a loaf pan.

I never like sticky buns. They are also super sweet and hurts my teeth. But I love these so much. So now I can say: I only like RLB's sticky buns.

Rugelach

I love Rose's cookie book and I want to make everything from it. I know I will. In time.

Rose said in a recent Q&A that the rugelach is her favorite Christmas cookie to make and to eat. So I made it this past weekend.

I am on the fence about whether it's the best to eat. But it sure is fun to make. First, you make the dough by creaming room temperature cream cheese and butter in the mixer. Add in vanilla and egg, then add in bleached AP flour slowly.

The mixture is pretty soft and has to be refrigerated for at least 2 hours.

While the dough is resting, I made the filling. Pretty easy. Coarsely chopped walnuts is mixed with brown sugar, granulated sugar, golden raisin, and cinnamon.

After the 2 hour mark, I took out the dough to roll. This part was a bit confusing. I thought that the recipe would say to roll out the dough like how I would roll out croissant dough. I mean, after all, the rugelach is kinda shaped like a croissant. But the recipe actually said to split the dough into 4 pieces and roll each one into a circle. That doesn't make a lot of sense for me. So I just sort of roll each piece into a messy rectangle.

The only fruit preserves I have in the house is orange marmalade so I used that. I was a bit worried that it would affect the taste or make it bitter. But then again apricot preserves doesn't have a lot of taste. And I figured that its main purpose would be to wet the dough so the filling can stick to it. So orange marmalade it is. I didn't even try to water it down, just dip the brush into it and brush it onto the pastry.

I wish I had shaped these rugelach better. They are not very uniform, some are big and some are small. But I think they are cute.

They are pretty tasty. I would not say I'm a huge fan of them. They tasted more like bread to me and not a cross between pastry and cookie like Rose said.

Recipe: Rose's Christmas Cookies

Cinnamon Raisin Bread

A couple of weekends ago, I woke up to a craving of sweet bread. Leafing through Rose Levy Beranbaum's Bread Bible, I saw a recipe that looks good: Cinnamon Raisin Bread.

As with most bread recipes that I found, it requires the dough to be refrigerated overnight. I don't have time for that, so I cheated and did everything in 1 day.

First, combining the dry ingredients and added honey to it.

HCB: English Gingerbread Cake

I was looking forward to this cake. I've never had proper gingerbread before (since it's English, it must be proper, no? :)). I'm also looking forward to the opportunity to use my stash of golden syrup that I purchased from Amazon.

The cake is also very easy to make. I'm really liking all the easy cakes at the end of this bake through. It helps me mentally because now I'm thinking, "okay yeah, after this easy one, I have x number left. YEAH!! (raising fists up in the air)."

HCB Free Choice: Apple Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake and Chocolate Apricot Roll with Lacquer Glaze

There are a couple of cakes from the book that I made last year but never blogged about. I was going to at some point but things other cakes got in the way.

This weekend I told myself that I should blog about them. No excuses! Even if the photos makes me cringe, especially the Apricot Roll one, where the sliced photo is all blurry. I took 8 photos of them and none were in focus. *@)*&)*%#_*#)!

There's not much to say about the Apple Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake as I don't remember much. Which to me means two things: the cake was easy and the taste was not bad but not super good either.

I do remember that we love the crunch of the topping on top and the slight crunch of the apple in the middle.

ABC: Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake

Hanaa asked me to participate as a guest blogger for her ABC baking club. It took me about 2 minutes to decide. The menu for this month is Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake from Flo Baker's Baking for All Occasions.

The recipe for this cake reminds me so much of cinnamon rolls, which I love. I am not a big fan of cardamon so I opted out of it.

I do not want to make the full portion of the recipe, so I made split the recipe into 5. It is not very challenging because most of the measurement is in grams. The biggest challenge is to figure out where to bake it in as the original recipe calls for a 9 inch pan.

Fortunately I do have a 4 inch pan, that I bought on a whim last year. Going off the appendix section in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, it said that 4 inch pan is 1 3/4 cups  and a 9 inch pan is 8 2/3 cups. Dividing that up 1.75/8.67 = 0.20.

But then looking at the recipe it used 2 eggs. Would be hard to split it into 5 and I don't want to waste eggs. The recipe used some water in the dough, so I decided to replace some of the water with the remainder egg.