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Raspberry rugelach: an absolute hit even novice bakers can tackle

’Tis the season for cookies, and every day till Christmas, Star journalists are baking a recipe from our archives. Follow our holiday baking adventures here, or get the recipes first plus some inspiration for your inbox with our free Cookie Calendar newsletter. Sign up here.
Star content strategy & analytics are Robin Honderich’s things. Baking is not. Becky Robinson, on the other hand, never goes a week without cooking something new.
The raspberry rugelach, first published in the Star’s cookie calendar in 2010, are crescent-shaped cookies which are buttery, jam-filled goodness.
“This is so exciting,” said my wife Becky, as we began our first attempt of the Star’s raspberry rugelach cookies.
In her many years of baking, this was the first time Becky had ever put cream cheese in a dough. Given our family’s devotion to bagels, we shouldn’t have been surprised about how well these turned out.
The recipe doesn’t require any complicated or hard to find ingredients and other than needing to account for the room temperature butter and cream cheese, and the one hour of cooling time for the dough, I think these are cookies that even novice bakers like me could tackle on their own.
In this run through I was not so brave, relying on Becky’s elite cooking skills to guide us. When it came time to roll out the dough, we did find we needed some extra flour on our surface and the rolling pin to keep it from sticking. And while spreading out the jam, we worried the ¼ cup looked quite light and so we boldly doubled up.
A risky decision we fretted about about the moment we went for it. I struggled with a wobbly pizza cutter but managed to make 24 mostly similar wedges. In rolling them up we did now notice the extra jam as some slipped out the sides, raising our concern level. Because we had used up all of our jam in the first round, we decided to experiment with chocolate hazelnut butter for the second batch of dough as the recipe pointed out that the filling was easily interchangeable.
In the end, the raspberry jam was both the clear winner and an absolute hit in our house. The chocolate nut butter version was also very good, but much drier and we all liked the moistness of the Raspberry Rugelach. Our final verdict on the extra jam was that it we loved the extra raspberry flavour but next time we might only do 1.5x of the jam to avoid weighing the cookie down. Enjoy!
The raspberry rugelach was not difficult and so delicious it will immediately become a new household staple. 
2 cups plus 1 tbsp (515mL) all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp (2 mL) kosher salt
1 cup (250 mL) unsalted butter, room temperature
250g package cream cheese, room temperature
3 tbsp (45 mL) granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1/2 cup (125 mL) raspberry jam
1 large egg, lightly beaten

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