Cooking With Esi

Oh, Rugelach, where have you been all my life!

I have never had rugelach before.  I tend to shy away from anything that’s not chocolate.  I seriously think I only ate chocolate cake before I got married.  Hubby has done a good job of expanding my dessert tastes, but I typically never choose anything with dried fruit.  So, even when we went to this fabulous Jewish bakery in Toronto I passed over the rugelach and picked chocolate banana bread instead.  It was so yummy, but now I wonder how delicious that rugelach was that I turned away from just because it had dried fruit in it and was decidedly void of chocolate.

I have decided in my BWJ endeavors to make every recipe as it is in the book except for one thing and that is nuts.  I love nuts, except in dessert.  I’m sure I’ll use them in some recipes in the future, but I chose to skip the nuts in the rugelach.  Since I had already decided I would use the dried fruit and the apricot levkar this seemed pretty reasonable to me.  grin.

I knew from the get go I had to make the apricot levkar since my whole family loves apricot jam (on positively everything)!  And sure enough, the kids and the hubby found the levkar and used it on toast before I could make the rugelach.  Thank goodness I had plenty to spare since I also made chocolate filling.

That chocolate filling was wonderful.  In fact, my family put it on toast, before I could make the rugelach.  (My clan has a thing for toast.)  I had found an Israeli woman’s recipe and she said it was what her family traditionally used for a chocolate filling.  I had originally wanted to use Nutella, but I’m so glad I used this instead.

I made the roll (from the book) and crescent shaped rugelach.  The crescent rolls were easy and I preferred baking them that way.  However, my whole family agreed that the roll shaped tasted better.  The cookie part was better tasting in the roll than in the crescent. 

And as for filling, I was so sure that the chocolate was the best.  But then I tried one with the apricot levkar without dried fruit and I was sure it was the best.  Then I tried an apricoct filled rugelach with dried fruit and it was the best.  Amazing.

This recipe makes a lot of rugelach.  And leftover rugelach are really great with coffee.  Real coffee.  (I’m pouting because I’m drinking decaf and rugelach tastes much better with really, strong coffee than decaf.)

If you would like to join us, please purchase the book Baking with Julia and start with the rugelach – you won’t be sorry.  Or take a look at My Baking Heart to see what we do at TWD.

And of course, I made so many rugelach over the weekend, but I have not one picture of the finished project.  Go figure.  I’ll try to sneak on onto the blog of my final batch today.