Welcome to the third installment of my Christmas Hannukah bake-a-thon!
Have you ever had rugelach? Ever heard of them? They're these awesome, petite crescents of cream cheese and butter dough wrapped around a filling such as cinnamon, nuts, or preserves. The fact that the dough is almost nothing but cream cheese and butter pretty much had me hooked. But I also saw an opportunity to inject a little deep-south peppery twist on this classic cookie.
Pepper jelly. You know, the jalapeno-spiked stuff that gets poured over blocks of cream cheese? Turns out it's a remedy for someone who bakes and eats lots of cookies and, quite frankly, needs a little help preventing palate fatigue (that's Melissa Clark's term, not mine, but it's well-put). I was afraid these might be too spicy in the end, but they're just spicy enough, and a welcome change of spice from the typical holiday range of cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg. I think you'll like them. And let's forge ahead and put pepper jelly in all kinds of sweet things! It'll be a revolution.
It's been about 5 years since I was lucky enough to dig into a slice of my pal Diana's drool-worthy apple cake, and when I tasted this today....oh, man. There was much more going on than I even remembered. Appleness, like juicy red and dangling from the tree. Pecans. Cinnamon--a proper, generous amount of it. But what really flipped me out was that I'd totally forgotten about the caramel glaze. When Diana sent her recipe a couple of weeks ago, it just said "glaze"--nothing about the caramel nature of it, nothing about the science project that it truly is (although an easy one; I have tips!). By glancing at the ingredients (sugar, butter, buttermilk, soda), you'd have to be a pretty frequent baker or candy-meister to say, "Oh yeah--that's caramel." I thought it was going to be a light, translucent, pouring glaze like my mom used to use on lemon jello cake. I was totally wrong. Eating this cake is like eating a caramel apple that somebody thoughtfully dosed with cinnamon and pecans, but it's a lot less messy and goes great with coffee. It's inspiring.
