A tasty but ugly treat

Last night I decided I'd make rugelach, which is a cookie-like pastry consisting of dough wrapped around chocolate and nuts or fruit. You spread the filling on a circle of dough (like pizza) and then either roll it up into a log and cut it into inch long pieces or cut pizza slices out and roll them up into crescents. Someone once told me its really hard to make good rugelach, but after looking at a few recipes I thought I could handle it. As usual I was mostly wrong, but thats not a surprise.

So first, I left out the sour cream when I was making the dough. I forget a crucial ingredient almost every time I bake, so this is not surprising. This was especially annoying, though, because its a difficult dough to make, the type that you have to get to just the right consistency and then STOP before overdoing it. Javert calmed me down after I realized my error and then helped me mix in the sour cream with my hands. The dough consistency ended up being okay in the end, but I felt pretty stupid till I tasted the final result.

Second, I couldn't find mini chocolate chips at Fairway. The downtown store has a pretty shabby baking aisle, and although they probably put the minichips somewhere, I really didn't think I needed them. Instead I figured I'd just cut up regular chips. Except that didn't really work--too many chocolate slivers--so I ended up using normal chips. Which I discovered are way too big for rugelach.

I decided to make both crescents and rolls so that I could compare the two. My crescents look terrible. Javert had a momentary lapse of spacial awareness and rolled the first crescent up backwards. Having read the directions, I knew the right way to roll, but still they look like little albino turds flecked with....Anyway, the rolls look better, except that the gigantic chips kept falling out and shoving them back in messed up the roll's shape.

In the end they tasted pretty good, but I'm going to try a couple variations next time I make them (which will be soon, since I froze two pieces of dough). At least they tasted good, right?