I was watching a competition Food Network TV Show where the contestants had to make rugelach. It is a cream cheese and butter pastry that is wrapped around a filling such as jam, chocolate chips, nuts and or cinnamon and sugar. I looked up recipes for rugelach. Basically most are 1/2 flour and the other 1/2 is 1/4 cream cheese and 1/4 butter. I know these pastries are always delicious and now I know why……They are very rich and fattening. I decided that since these pastries are very rich I only wanted to make a very small batch and figured out on how to only make EIGHT small pastries. The FUN part is that you can make any flavor you want. Figure out what filling you want. Then you have to roll out the pastry in some sort of sugar…see if you can figure out something that matches your filling in the sugar. I went with pistachio. I had in imported pistachio spread. And I mixed crushed pistachios with the sugar that I rolled the dough in. These came out FORKING AMAZING….Next time I will do a high end Nutella filling and do my sugar mixed with hazelnuts. I think a date filling with chocolate chips would be delicious. I think orange marmalade with a orange zest sugar topping would also be delicious. We could do a cherry filling with crushed almonds and sugar…..Could go on and on and on….The fun is for you to pick your flavor! (This recipe does not include a filling recipe…you have to come up with that yourself)

Ingredients for 8 servings

1/2 cup flour

small pinch salt

2 oz cream cheese

2 oz unsalted butter – chopped into small cubes or grated (I grated on a big hole grater and lost some of the butter)

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 egg yolk

sugar to roll dough….I used course raw sugar maybe two tablespoons, use any sugar you want like flour to roll sticky dough

optional -other add ons to sugar

A small amount of filling for your pastries (chocolate chips, jam, nuts and honey, peanut butter, etc)

Directions

Mix up the flour, salt, cream cheese, butter, vanilla, and yolk with a fork. You don’t need to mix it up all the way more like 80%. This dough is rich and soft so you need to wrap it in plastic wrap in a disk shape and chill it in the refrigerator over night or give it a few hours.

When you are ready to roll.

Set your oven to 375 degrees F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Use your sugar like flour to roll out the dough and make it into a round shape. (I used raw sugar and crushed pistachios)

Spread your filling on the dough.

Cut like a pizza in quarters and cut threw each quarter so you have 8 wedges.

Roll UP from the large or crust end and place on the parchment lined baking sheet.

Place on middle rack. Mine took 14 minutes in the preheated 375 degree F oven. Timing may differ slightly.

These are FORKING DELICIOUS!

Enjoy!