Rugelach

This was as close as I could come to a good-looking photo of my poor batch of Rose's wonderful rugelach.  I've made them before with no greater problem than a sometimes sloppy rolling technique, which didn't matter anyway because they're so delicious.  I blame it on the foil.  I'm pretty sure I've never used foil before.  You don't have to look too closely to figure out that this rugelach is not going to leave the foil without a fight.  And in the battle between me and the foil, I lost.

Mixing the dough was easy enough, and, actually, at this point the dough seemed quite docile.  I put it in the refrigerator, as directed.  Even if I hadn't been directed, I would have refrigerated it because I'm not the world's slowest learner.

While the dough was chilling, I made the filling.  Ha.  That was an accidental poem.  Or piece of doggerel, more accurately.

Even though I love raisin-walnut filling, we'd just made raisin walnut tartlets (in yet another example of sub-par planning skills), so I decided to go with something completely different:  almonds and chocolate pearls.  And despite reading the recipe three times, I missed the instruction to use superfine sugar in the filling and eliminate the brown sugar and cinnamon.  I just wish that mistake had been my biggest problem.

Brown sugar and cinnamon isn't awful with chocolate and raspberry, but it's not exactly a match made in heaven either.

The dough was soft and malleable, easy to roll out.  It didn't seem too soft or sticky.

At this point it looks like a chocolate-raspberry pizza.

Maybe I stretched the dough too thin when I was rolling up the cookies.  But at this point I wasn't worried in the slightest.

"During baking, a little of the apricot always melts out into the foil.  It is therefore necessary to remove the rugelach from the foil before the apricot hardens."  Apparently this instruction holds true even if you're not using apricot, although I think it was mostly sugar that leaked out.  The cookies were far too soft and fragile to move right away, so I had the choice of mashing them into the foil and ruining them or ruining them later when trying to pry them from the foil.  I chose ruinous path #2.

The cookies were still good, but no one ate them except the cookie maker and the cookie maker's husband, who stood around the kitchen hacking bite-sized pieces off the foil until we got tired of eating crumbs.  I know that these rugelach can be made successfully.  They're a classic Rose recipe, and I'll make them again, but it'll take a while for me to get up my nerve.