Chocolate Cherry Bomb Rugelach

Easy Peasy Sweet and Breezy

I love Rugelach. I discovered it in my 20’s, working in as a waiter at the Deli Haus in Kenmore square in Boston. I had the morning service system down pat. My shift was 8-2, but since the joint opened at 6:30, I was the second wave of waiters and didn’t have to worry about setting up the station. I could walk in, punch in and start slinging overstuffed sandwiches, bagels and millions of eggs to the puffy eyed and whiny B.U. , Emerson and MIT students that tumbled in for breakfast without effort. I was totally chill with smoking a joint with my morning coffee before leaving my basement apartment at 7:45AM, walkman donned, Bauhaus filling my brain, squinting and daydreaming through my 10 minute walk through the fens, past the green monster to work. My sleepy, groany, and hung over customers never noticed that I arrived to work so baked.

Being a routinely high server, I needed to snack throughout the morning. Every shift I’d find an excuse to slide behind the deli counter and I‘d grab as many pieces of rugelach as my hand could net and slide then into my waist apron pocket. For the next half hour as I dropped orders in the kitchen, I’d sneak a slug of coffee and jam a whole rugelach into my mouth, one bite, everybody knows the rules. That is how I became intimately involved with rugelach.

Rugelach is a one or two bite stuffed pastry that has a flaky-crisp rich cream cheese dough on the outside, is tender and buttery on the inside and is filled with an array of sweet fillings. The fat and tanginess of cream cheese makes for a mighty flavorful dough. Historically, sour cream dough was more common, but over time, cream cheese dough became the norm and it is what has created the Rugelach we all know and love.

Common Rugelach fillings could be smears of raspberry, cinnamon, walnut-raisin, apricot, almond and of course chocolate. My faves are chocolate, a simple mixture of finely chopped chocolate mixed with a little cocoa powder and sugar, and almond, made with sliced almonds and marzipan, My new love, however, is my Chocolate Cherry Bomb. I was about to make a batch of chocolate and a batch of raspberry filled Rugelach, the latter simply filled with a schmear of jam, when I discovered I was fresh out of raspberry jam. But fear not. There was a jar of Morello cherry jam in the cupboard so cherry it would be. As I smeared the cherry jam across the rolled dough, flattening the jiggly lumps, I spied the cup of shaved chocolate I had set next to the cutting board and remembered my childhood affliction with Chocolate covered cherries. I opened the wine fridge and grabbed the jar of Maraschino cherries i adore in my Manhattans. I spooned out some of the Maraschino syrup and drizzled it on the Morello jam, sprinkled chocolate all over the double cherry situation, rolled up the dough, dusted it with cinnamon-sugar and baked off a fine batch of my new favorite, Chocolate Cherry Bomb Rugelach.

Traditional Rugelach are made individually, and rolled over like little dumplings, but making a long roll and slicing it into rounds is more common now and perfectly acceptable.