Sugar Twig Bakery's First Ever BLOG!!!

Welcome to Sugar Twig Bakery, an uber cute place for sweet confections and the recipes that create them! So far we have 3 members! Emily, Michelle, and Kelly(all by her lonesome in a different state)! We have begun to bake often this summer when we are together as we have a lack of better things to do like watching Labyrinth with David Bowie. We like to try a lot and eat a little(or maybe just...a lot)! We are kooky and weird and not this cheesy...usually.

Anyway, on to our first blog of our experiments with baking! Today features Rugelach, mini loaf cakes, and sugar cookies! But the Rugelach were the coolest and most awesome-est so we'll have an entire how-to with pictures for those!

Rugelach

8 Servings

Time: About 2 hours, lots of fridge chilling!

Rugelach are yummy cream cheese and butter pastries rolled into a nice spiral and filled with a sweet jam filling(but you can experiment with whatever you want!) The dough itself is not sweet, the filling could be anything, jam and chocolate and pecans, or even some crushed oreos maybe, anything you want and are willing to try. These are really cute and elegant looking and easy to make!! We sized down the recipe to make just 8 of them instead of the original 64. Here's how to make them:

Dough

1/8 cup all purpose flour

2 tbs butter

1 oz cream cheese (We used low-fat since it was all we had, came out great!)
Filling
Anything you want to try!

A suggestion would be

-2tbs chopped pecans

-1/8 cup raspberry jam

-maybe 1/2 tbs chopped semisweet chocolate

-Grind the pecans and chocolate in food processor until you get a coarse paste and then mix that with the raspberry jam in a bowl.

-You will also need egg wash and cinnamon sugar(optional) for the end.

Making the dough is easy!!

First cream together the butter and cream cheese(we softened them to make it easier). Then slowly mix the flour in until just combined!

Now wrap the dough tightly and chill until it's firm, about 15-20 min in the fridge should do it. We just put it into a ziploc bag and wrapped it up.






Now you'll want to lightly flour a cutting board to roll out the dough. You probably will need to put some flour in the rolling pin too. Roll the dough to an even thickness and fold into thirds and pop it into the fridge for another hour or even overnight! (Did you know there's yeast in the air??)



Ours looked like this before we popped into the fridge for an hour. Make your filling. After you're finished chilling the dough, Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and lightly grease a cookie sheet.

Take your dough out of the fridge and roll it into a circle, about 5 inches all around. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and spread your filling onto the round. We used just plain raspberry jam for one half, and we tried to smush pieces of marshmallow and chocolate chips on the other half. We put too much jam and it bubbled out the sides and burned! And the marshmallows got huge too and burned out the sides, but the rugelach were fine once removed from their burned filling puddles. Now cut the round like a pizza into 8 triangle wedges.

Take a wedge and roll it from the bottom of the triangle to the tip. Now place your Rugelach onto your cookie sheet!
Finish them off by brushing them with eggwash and a final sprinkling of cinnamon sugar! The eggwash gives them a really pretty shiny finish. Bake these for 25-30 min, rotating the pan as needed to bake evenly. We just used a small conventional toaster oven and set it to bake instead of heating up the huge kitchen oven!

Remember we sized down our recipe to make a modest serving of 8, enough for 2 people, rather than 64! If you multiply the recipe by 8 to make the original amount, when you take the dough out of the fridge to roll out into circles, divide into 4 separate 10-inch circles, and cut 16 slices from each! These treats are really versatile, try lots of things with them, don't stick with the exact recipe all the time!

The Finished Product!

Yummy! Look how shiny and pretty they are from the eggwash!

Soft Lofty Sugar Cookies

These sugar cookies are not very sweet and taste sort of floury, but some really like the taste of this! It is soft and almost bland, not a rich cookie, but some love it! I really liked these cookies. It could be fixed with some good frosting if you're partial to a less rich cookie.

After making the dough(i originally made it weeks ago) I froze most of it, i then thawed it out in the fridge for most of the day until i could smush it down with a rolling pin, since they were chilled it was easier to cookie cut them! Tasted just as fresh as they did when i baked part of the dough weeks before!

Want the recipe?? Here it is---> http://www.recipezaar.com/132511

IMPORTANT NOTE: We omitted the sour cream, lemon extract and salt COMPLETELY, and replaced the 1/2 cup of shortening with veggie oil, we hate trans fats!

If you try a recipe, please tell us about in the comments! We love comments! And tell us about moderations and changes you may have made and how it effected the final product!