Rugelach despair

Posted by -Sue
I'd never made rugelach before this challenge and, trust me, I'll never make them again!! I looked at a lot of recipes online, as I usually do, and came up with a yummy sounding recipe with cream cheese pastry and apricot filling. Well, they were yummy, but I haven't done a challenge that I liked less than this one. I had no fun making them!!
Making the dough wasn't a big deal. The recipe said to divide the dough into 4 pieces and refridgerate for 2 hours or overnight. Being pressed for time, I opted for overnight. Mistake #1. The dough was so hard when I took it out of the fridge that it was like trying to roll cement. The directions said to roll the dough out in a circle an eighth of an inch thick. Well, as many years as I've been rolling pie dough I have yet to figure out a way to really roll anything that resembles a circle, so frustration was starting to set in. The recipe then called for spreading apricot jam on the dough, which I ended up doing with my hands, and then sprinkling said dough with a combination of chopped apricots and cinnamon sugar. OK, not too bad. Then the recipe said to cut the circle in 12 wedges. By now the dough was so soft that I had trouble cutting it (more frustration) . On to the roll-up part. Except the dough was soft enough by now that it didn't want to roll, and all the filling was oozing out as I rolled. By now I was ready to tear my hair out, and I had 3 more pieces of dough to deal with. Aha, I thought, I'll do the next 3 all at once. Mistake #2. Of course the last of the pieces was sticking to the counter, because now it was too soft. At that point I just wanted to get them in the oven and be done with them, but there was one more surprise waiting for me. As they baked, all that apricot jam oozed out of the rugelach onto the parchment paper and under the dough. And then it burned.
I had started out taking pictures, but half way through, covered with sticky dough and apricot jam, I quickly gave that up as a lost cause. Because the dough was so soft it really didn"t "roll", so I ended up with kind of flattened looking things. Not pretty. My only consolation was that they did taste good, but I'm not sure all that aggravation was worth it! I'm hoping Feb's challenge won't make me quite so nuts!