This is a thorough and overly personal explanation of one of my favorite things to bake: rugelach. Rugelach are an Ashkenazi Jewish pastry consisting of dough rolled around a filling, usually in a crescent shape. The chocolate filling in this recipe creates moisture and density, and the dough is light but flavorful.
All rugelach are kind of mediocre except for these. These are exceptional.
Rugelach also conveniently merge my major interests: baking, obsessive TV-watching, and Jewish culture. This recipe is built off one I originally got from my late Great Aunt Rhoda. My mom found it in an old synagogue women’s group cookbook, sandwiched between four other rugelach recipes that I would never bake again. I didn’t know my great aunt very well, but my mom makes sure I take a moment of silence in her memory whenever I bake these. So, thank you, Great Aunt Rhoda and Mom.
There are only three ingredients in this dough, so you won’t have a ton of time to watch TV while you make it, but you’ll be able to watch at least 30-40 minutes of TV while you create the cookies themselves!
Ingredients List
Dough:
1 cup unsalted butter (softened)
8 ounces cream cheese (softened)
2 cups flour
Filling:
1 cup chocolate chips
2 teaspoons Cinnamon
1 cup Sugar
(adjust to taste, amounts can be approximate)
Materials:
Additional cinnamon and sugar for rolling out dough
baking sheets
parchment paper
rolling pin or wine bottle
Making the Dough
Mix together the softened cream cheese, butter, and flour. I used my mom’s stand mixer, but if everything is at room temperature it shouldn’t be too hard to do it with a hand mixer or wooden spoon. When the dough is completely mixed, light, and cohesive, it’s done.
Divide up the dough. I usually divide it into three sections, according to the recipe I use, but it just depends on how large you want the rugelach. The larger the section, the larger the rugelach, obviously, and I prefer tiny rugelach. Wrap each section in plastic cling film and flatten into a disc. Put them all in the fridge in a little stack or side by side.
The longest amount of time I’ve ever let the dough chill in the fridge is three days, and the shortest is two hours. Everything comes out exactly the same.
Creating the Cookies
Preheat the oven(s) to 350 degrees right when you’re ready to start rolling these out.
Make the filling. For the chocolate-filled ones like I made here, get chocolate chips or some chocolate bars or something. My family has a giant tub of chocolate chips in the cabinet that someone put a spoon in three years ago and we all eat from constantly and don’t even think it’s weird. I used those.
Using either a mixer, blender, or knife and cutting board, chop the chocolate into very fine crumb-like pieces. Try to keep them on the smaller side. Mix in a larger bowl with cinnamon and sugar.
I recommend you put aluminum foil down all over your work surface to make cleaning easier. I would roll out the dough on a large cutting board, since you’ll be slicing into the dough eventually.
Put on Netflix or Hulu or a YouTube playlist, because your hands are going to get disgusting and you NEED continuous play to distract yourself. I recommend watching something you don’t find stressful or potentially secondhand embarrassing, because skipping through when your hands are gross is a disaster. Perhaps a video playlist of Alexa Chung putting on her own eyeliner or the Fast and Furious movie of your choice?
Take out your baking sheets and line them with parchment paper.
Sprinkle the mixture of cinnamon sugar on the cutting board to make rolling the dough easier. This also gives the previously plain dough some flavor.
Take the first disk of dough. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar mixture over the rolling pin/ bottle of wine. The dough will be difficult to roll out at first, and if, like me, you have improbably little arm strength, you should really throw your body weight into it. Re-sugar the cutting board and the rolling pin. It gets easier as you roll the dough out more, lose patience, and gain aggression.
You may have to roll this out a few times, folding it back together and rolling it out again. Try to get it into as much of a circle as you can. I sometimes use a pizza cutter to get edges or weird sides out so I’m not constantly re-rolling the dough. It is typically at this point that I become frustrated and start questioning how much I even want rugelach in the first place. You’ve come this far, though, and in my case my mom probably requested that I make them for Chanukkah/Rosh Hashanah/a general family gathering, and everyone will be extremely annoying if I don’t come through.
Using a pizza cutter, cut the circle into 16 triangles. First slice through the center to make two halves, then slice into quarters, and so on and so forth.
Sprinkle the filling over it. Try to get the larger chunks of chocolate around the outer edge of the circle, so they will stay in the middle of the rugelach. Don’t worry about overfilling the rugelach, since excess filling will fall out during the rolling process.
Starting from the outside, roll a triangle towards the circle’s center, trying to keep as much of the filling in as possible. A lot will spill out, which is OKAY and expected — you’ve accounted for this!
Make the edge of the tip the bottom of the rugelach, and fold the edges so it is a little like a crescent. Do this for every tiny triangle. As you create each rugelach cookie, place it onto your baking sheet. They don’t expand, so you can fit all 16 on a regular baking sheet. The parchment paper is there so you don’t have to worry about them sticking.
Bake for about 15 minutes, but definitely check between minutes 10-15 to see how they are doing. They should be a little bit browned and puffed up, but not too much. Light and crispy on the outside, dense on the inside.
Take them out of the oven when they’re done and put the baking sheet on a surface that can handle a hot baking sheet, like your stove or something. After a few minutes, you can transfer them to a wire rack or cooling sheet and then shove them all directly into your mouth or wait a bit and create a little rugelach hoard.
Repeat for the other two disks.
Great Job!
Whenever I make these I feel as though I really have a shot at opening a wildly successful Jewish bakery, or medium-successful Jewish food truck. I would make rugelach, my mom would make several types of kugel, and it would be adorable.
You can give these out to any coworkers you like or need to impress, but be prepared to explain what rugelach are 30 times, until you just start telling them you brought in a Jewish pastry (same explanation works with Hamantaschen, Babka, mandelbrot, etc).
Also, bring them to your grandparents! They’ll be so proud and glad that you visited.
If you make these, I hope they come out well. Please let me know in the comments if you have any issues or questions!
All photos by Jackie Friedman.
Tags: baking, food, lisa yelsey, recipes, rugelach
EEEEEEE I am going to try this out with my fancy new GF flour mix this weekend. I will let you know how it goes!
My mother always told me that old synagogue cookbooks are the best for finding good recipes for old school Jewish food. We use someone’s aunt’s kugel recipe and a friend’s grandma’s brisket recipe. I love how it’s all gotten passed down and more and more well loved throughout the years.
Yes please let me know how the GF version works! I’ve never tried it but I get asked a lot!
I love that too! I think almost every Jewish foods I’ve made are from old clippings and family collections.
“These are really good! What are they?”
“Hamantaschen.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“They’re haman – uh, cookies. They’re cookies with jam. Oil instead of butter in the dough.”
I started calling my honey cake “spice cake” a few years back.
My fiancé is Sephardic and had never had Hamantaschen. And then I tried to make them with coconut oil because that was what was in the cupboard and the dough just fell apart all over the place (but they *were* delicious).
No baked goods in my house were ever dairy, because otherwise HOW would you eat them after a fleishig (meat) meal??
Earlier in my life it was all margarine though, and since we couldn’t find Kosher for Passover maragarine, Passover was always the novel holiday of BUTTER existing in our house…
Lisa- this was beautiful, thank you!
This makes me want to cry… I would seriously consider going vegetarian if it meant dairy desserts at every meal.
This is what my boyfriend made when he met my parents. Review: “So nu, when’s the chuppah??”
We had been dating for a month. Now he’s my husband.
I am SO excited to try this recipe!! I LOVE rugelach, but haven’t found a good recipe. Probably because I wasn’t checking old synagogue cookbooks.
Old synagogue cookbooks : junior league cookbooks : garden club cookbooks.
I recently saw a fancy, coffee-table cookbook from Annapolis junior league and was immediately suspicious. These cookbooks cannot possibly be considered authentic without a comb binding.
I grew up with Lutheran church cookbooks, so if anyone needs to know how to make jello salad and casseroles, I’m your woman. But nobody needs to know, promise.
Me too me too! SOOOO much butter/oleo.
Also, Lisa, I am coveting your dog. And your baking skills. But mostly DOGGY.
my nanna makes almost exactly these rugelach! this is my family’s recipe!
is there any chance this old synagogue cookbook came from a temple in/around Forest Hills? 🙂
These look wonderful. I can hardly wait to try them.
I only found out about rugelach in the very recent past! They were such fun to make, and so delicious, and I fear if I make this recipe I will end up eating the entire batch myself.
Looks delicious, but I’m slightly skeptical about the chocolate + cinnamon combination. Usually, when I get them, they’re either chocolate *or* cinnamon (with chocolate being far superior).
i love making and eating rugelach every winter, but chocolate?? maybe i will try that next time. our standard looks about the same, except with crushed walnuts instead of the chocolate chips.
All rugelach *are* kind of mediocre! The only Ashkenazi food that I feel that way about, I think – the rest is very polarizing. (Kasha varnishkes and babka on one end, gefilte fish and knishes on the other.) I’ll have to try making these!
Oh my goodness, a rugelach recipe that is safe and free of ALL my partner’s food allergies. Bless you!
Ooooh I can’t wait to try this recipe. I love a good rugelach, but you’re right that they’re hard to find. (Good ones, that is.)
Can we talk about where your family got the huge tub of chocolate chips?
Also, I CANNOT wait to try these! For some reason I was under the impression that making rugelach was a pain in the ass, but my husband has never tried any and it’s damn near impossible to find them in the UK (or at least where we live) so I plan on becoming a rugelach factory.
Haha my dad read this and told me to specify that we bought a giant tupperware tub that we continuously refill with Costco bags of chocolate chips, not just one very old tub.
You can definitely churn these out, hope you and your husband love them!
My g/f and I made these awesome sliced rugelach cookies this past Hannukah – basically roll the dough and topping into a log and then cut slices off and bake them like that. Did a couple different fillings, I think one was just jam from a jar, another was like cinnamon and sugar and ground-up walnuts I think? They were friggin’ delicious.
UPDATE: this was the recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2007/11/rugelach-p…
Can someone clarify cream cheese for me? (I’m in the UK and I’m never quite sure if we mean the same things). Cream cheese as in Philidelphia cream cheese? Or more like curd cheese (which I’d use to make a baked cheese cake)?
Definitely Philadelphia cream cheese. (I don’t know what a baked cheese cake is at alll, sorry!)
Thanks!
Cheesecake? I think?
YOUR DOG IS ADORABLE. Also thank you for the lovely recipe. Def going to watch make-up tutorials for hours while making this.
I am adding this to my list, looks wonderful and you are adorable!!!
Definitely Philadelphia cream cheese. (I don't know what a baked cheese cake is at alll, sorry!)
These look gorgeous. I’m not a huge dessert person, but I can eat as much rugelach as you could put in front of me.
For anyone who is not so huge on chocolate (yes, we exist and we miiiight be freaks of nature, but please be kind)- I’m going to leave this recipe here just for the different fillings: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-the-best-rug…
It’s the only rugelach recipe I’ve tried before, and no matter what size I tried to cut the cookies, in order to get the top to be flaky, they had to be in the oven long enough for the bottom to burn (burn-burn, not just toast a lot) – so, don’t use this recipe, but they have some great jammy/nutty combinations for spreading on your dough, and I will vouch for their deliciousness.
These look gorgeous. I'm not a huge dessert person, but I can eat as much rugelach as you could put in front of me.
For anyone who is not so huge on chocolate (yes, we exist and we miiiight be freaks of nature, but please be kind)- I'm going to leave this recipe here just for the different fillings: http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-the-best-rug…
It's the only rugelach recipe I've tried before, and no matter what size I tried to cut the cookies, in order to get the top to be flaky, they had to be in the oven long enough for the bottom to burn (burn-burn, not just toast a lot) – so, don't use this recipe, but they have some great jammy/nutty combinations for spreading on your dough, and I will vouch for their deliciousness.