Today's recipe was one that I have been searching for - for quite some time actually. My kids love rugelach but in general, rugelach are either made with a yeast dough (somewhat of a pain) or with shortening (gross). And so I have been looking for one that is made without yeast and without trans-fat. When I saw this recipe - made with no yeast and with oil - I should have known something was up. But I chose to ignore my radar and make them anyway.
And here, sadly, is what happened. I mixed the dough exactly as the recipe was written, which is unusual for me, but somewhere deep down I must have felt that if I deviated from the instructions the results would be worse than they were.
I mixed together:
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup sugar until creamy.
I added
3 cups of flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 cup of orange juice
1 teaspoon of vanilla
These last four ingredients were added by alternating the wet and dry ingredients. The dough was then mixed until everything was incorporated. As instructed, I placed the dough into the fridge for one hour. But even before I did that, I knew something was off. The dough was just so sticky, there was no way that an hour in the fridge was going to help. Spending the night in the fridge wouldn't help this dough. But I persevered. And also, I couldn't bake anything else while this dough was in the fridge because the dough was in the bowl from my kitchen aid. So I wiped the counter down and let it be. And besides, it was time for the baby to have a bottle and for the older one to nap, so leave the kitchen we did.
An hour (okay, more like three hours) later, we came back. As per the instructions again, we floured the counter and dumped out the dough onto the floured counter - except it wouldn't come out of the bowl. It was so sticky that when I turned the bowl completely upside down, the dough did not even move at all. It just stayed there, stuck to the bowl like a sweaty fat man on a leather couch*. I scraped the dough out onto the counter, dumped a truckload of flour on top and mixed and kneaded, which I was quite peeved about because if I wanted to knead something, I would have just made a yeast dough.
Anyway, finally, finally, I was able to roll it out into a rectangle. Now, I have made rugelach before and one would normally roll the dough into a circle because rugelach are made by cutting a circle of dough into 8 or 12 triangles (crisscrossing the dough with a pizza cutter - if that helps with the imagery), spreading filling on top and then rolling up each triangle, starting at the bottom of the triangle and rolling towards the tip of the triangle. Make sense? I wish I had a picture to show you, but alas, I could not cut triangles from this dough. All I got was the rectangle. This rectangle, actually:
Except that the dough must have forgotten how much flour I had already added to it because it was still stuck to the counter. At that point, it was already 2:30pm and I have to get my boys from school at 3pm. What to do? So I scraped the dough back up, filling and all, and rolled small pieces into balls and placed them on the cookie sheet that has been waiting so patiently to bake some rugelach. Oh, and I dipped each ball into more of the filling mixture before putting it on the cookie sheet.
The cookies baked in a preheated 350 oven for 15 minutes. They looked exactly the same coming out as they did going into the oven. Not such a good sign. But Josh was brave. He tasted one. And he said they weren't bad. He even asked if I could make them again. I said I could try, but I really have no idea how much flour I mixed in there. Could be one extra cup, could be three. But make them again, most likely, not.
We will move on from here and give a silent prayer of thanks that Tuesday is over. And also that Cookie Tuesday only come around once a week. So. Much. Pressure.
*Are you laughing? Cause I was. For a long time. That was Josh's editing there. My original sticky dough analogy was "like doody on a potty". I'm still not sure which is more inappropriate and/or disgusting, but there you have it.