This weeks recipe for Tuesdays with Dorie is The Rugelach That Won Over France. This Rugelach not only won over France but my household as well.
We started with the dough, which couldn't have been easier. We pulsed it together in the food processor and stopped when it was forming curds. Once we dumped it out on the board it easily formed into a ball. We made the dough first thing in the morning and refrigerated it in two squares for approx. 6 hours. I love that the dough for this Rugelach uses cream cheese, just like the recipe I make from my grandma.
Before we removed the dough from the fridge, we blended together all of the ingredients for the filling just as the recipe called for: toasted pecans, chopped chocolate chips, dried cherries and coconut. (We made half of the cookies without coconut at my daughters request.) I used a large knife and coursely chopped all the filling ingredients. It was hard to keep from eating the filling before we put it in the rugelach. Once the filling was prepared it was time to roll out the dough, one piece at a time. This dough couldn't have been easier to work with and roll out. We didn't roll it into perfect squares, but once we put in the filling and rolled it up you couldn't tell.
I thought ahead this time and figured out what the rolled dough would fit on in my freezer. When I froze the tart dough for the last recipe it was too large to fit in the freezer and had to go in sideways and got a little bent. This time I found a cutting board that fit perfectly with all of the rolled cookies on it, I even cleared out a shelf so it would lie flat. I froze them for a little less than an hour. They were a perfect consistency for slicing when I took them out. I sliced them closer to an 1" thick. The filling seemed to stay in better when they were a bit thicker. It yielded fewer cookies, but you can eat fewer when they are larger.
I cooked these at 375 degrees rather than the 400 degrees the recipe called for. I've noticed with the recipes in this cookbook I need to adjust the temperature for my oven down about 25 degrees from what is called for. I've been keeping the cooking time the same and the adjustment has worked well. My daughter kept commenting on the wonderful smell coming from the kitchen as these were baking.
Tuesdays With Dorie does not post the recipes they use. They all can be found in Dorie Greenspan's book Baking Chez Moi.
This was a nice ending to a crazy weekend. Yesterday our dog decided he could fly (Dog's can't fly! He learned that a little late.) After a trip to the vet and some pain meds for a few days he should be good as new by the end of week.
