A few weeks ago, I tried my hand at making rugelach......And it turned out GREAT! I usually shy away from making my own pasty dough because it seems that I just don't have the knack for it and never have an easy time with it. But this dough was the nicest dough I have ever worked with. It was smooth, soft and just wonderful. It is a recipe by The Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten. I pretty much followed her recipe exactly except for a couple of small things. Here is the link for the original recipe on Food Network.
It started by creaming cream cheese and butter together.
Then I added granulated sugar except I used vanilla sugar. Vanilla sugar is a wonderful thing. After you use the seeds out of a vanilla bean, instead of throwing the pod away, add it to your sugar bowl. It flavors all the sugar and as you use the sugar out of the bowl, keep the vanilla bean pod in there and keep adding more sugar. The vanilla bean pod will last quite a while.
I follwed the rest of the recipe for the dough, spilt it into quarters and chilled it. I only ended up rolling out one the quaters and froze the rest of the dough. It freezes very nicely and when you need or crave some, the dough is already done.
I rolled out the dough and instead of using apricot jam, I used this wonderful Carrot Cake Jam my friend Traci gave me. It has chunks of apple in it so I put it into a food processor to make it nice and smooth.
I spread my jam over the dough and sprinkled it the cinnamon sugar and walnuts. I left out the raisins because I'm just not a big fan of them...
I cut the dough into 12 pieces by first quarting it, then cutting the quaters into thirds. I rolled each piece up, sprinkled it with more cinnamon sugar and placed them on a baking sheet.
Very easy and soooo good! I have also made a batch using apricot jam and plan on making some soon using strawberry jam.
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