TWD: Rugelach Pinwheels

I am familiar with Rugelach. I made it last year for the holiday and I ate probably half of what I made all by my lonesome, it was that good. So when Piggy from Piggy's Cooking Journal chose Rugelach for our TWD pick this week, I was thinking...well been there done that, and man can't wait to do it again!!

I don't have a FP and I hate using my small little chop n' grind sub one for stuff like this, so I looked up the other recipe I used last year from one of my fave blogs, Smitten Kitchen, and since it said FP...and I made it last year...I figured I had used a hand mixer, so I did that for this batch as well, mixing by hand in the end so as not to overmix the dough.



Chilled it for a few hours, rolled it out between wax paper and flour, brushed on some apricot preserves, brown sugar, cinnamon, chopped pecans and rum-soaked raisins, rolled it into a long log and chilled it. I made another log with raspberry preserves I picked up in Paris, brown sugar, cinnamon, chopped walnuts and mini semi-sweet chocolate chips.



Then I cut slices off of the log, and made Rugelach Pinwheels. This is a far easier way than cutting triangles and rolling little croissants, esp when your skills at cutting croissant triangles is pretty darn crappy like mine. I do like the original rugelach method though so I might give it a try when I have more time, but today was not the day to spend an hour fixing misshapen rugelach croissants!





The pinwheels baked up beautifully, sometimes they lose their shape which I like because then you can see the lovely carmelized brown sugar, cinnamon and raisins peeking out. YUM.



Oh and the dough from the hand mixer? Beautiful...it is light and flakey, absolutely buttery perfection!!! Def doing these again for holiday..just like I did last year. Find the recipe at Piggy's site up above, and check out all the TWD fabulousness that is Rugelach over at the TWD site.

Oh and I made a random loner Rugelach croissant style, and you see how horrible I am at rolling it...yep better stick with the pinwheels. The good thing about Rugelach is that even when stuff oozes out and/or your cookies don't have much shape, they still taste really amazing!!