January in February

Posted by - Nancy

Last month's challenge for Have the Cake was Rugelach. I have never made rugelach and I can't even remember ever really eating rugelach so I was excited to tread on this new territory. However as the month progressed I simply kept pushing this task to the back burner. There was always something else to do: gifts to knit, a house to clean, laundry, sewing projects. Then we traveled home for a week and I plain forgot to even bake the challenge.

So once I returned home on the 30th I thought I should get on with the baking. I started by looking for a good recipe. The recipe that was posted was a good one, but I am just not a big fruit baked in cookies fan and wasn't excited by the apricot filling. I decided to use a dough recipe by Ina Garten and it proved to be yummy. It included cream cheese which some of the other bakers used and raved about.

I decided to make a chocolate filling instead and made it up. I used a block of cream cheese, and a little bit of butter. Now I wanted to add some cocoa powder, however while I was digging in my cabinet to find some this happened:

The vanilla was sitting on the edge and I bumped it and it fell. The lid broke and it splattered. And to top it off I didn't have any cocoa powder. I had used it all up while making hot cocoa mix, so I threw that in instead. The first batch I made had the filling and some walnuts in it and they tasted good, but were missing something. So the second batch I used the filling plus some mini chocolate chips and pistachos. Sounds good right?

These were okay but would have tasted a lot better with salted nuts. Oh well. Anyway, I cut and rolled these and then into the oven for 18 minutes.

They baked up nicely and were perfectly browned when coming out of the oven.

So overall these were a very simple cookie to make. My husband has requested I make them again sometime. I think I will work on my filling though, the chocolate flavor needed to be kicked up and the nuts needed adjusting, but the dough was perfect and I am willing to tweak this recipe.