So, I’m not Jewish. I’m not a celiac.

But I made this.

Yes, that’s right. Gluten Free Rugelach.

To be fair, I work with many Jewish families and I don’t eat any wheat/gluten (by choice…yes, really.) I had the insane idea that I’d make the traditional Israeli/Turkish (gluten-full) cheese bourekas for The Big Dinner Party and I’d make this for me and J (who doesn’t eat wheat/gluten ever either, because of me, except when she goes home to Boston to her Italian family dinners.)

I can’t afford to buy the good GF treats on a regular basis, hence poverty and a sweet tooth made me reconsider my clumsy baking record and give GF delicacies a whirl. Last week I Googled GF pastry puff dough, and Gluten Free Girl & The Chef appeared on the scene (as usual.) I’m not really keen on using her recipes because I usually get confused and end up messing things up. Though this recipe seemed fool-proof, I was too busy bungee cording pieces of wood to my kitchen table and digging through a plastic tub of forks at the thrift store to worry about the sorta nitpicky and methodical nature of gluten free baking.

And now it’s tonight. I’m actually supposed to be doing other things, but ProcrastiKate hijacked my night and whispered sweet baking nothings in my ear. Plus, I even bought the cream cheese for this recipe; deadlines schmedlines.

For all you gluten-eaters, flakes are pretty much unheard of in gluten-free land. Kudos to Shauna & the Chef for nailing this one.So, should you be interested in giving this a whirl, I’m attaching my filling recipe, since Gluten-Free Girl rattles off about 10 tasty possibilities and approximately 0 measurements/recipes for such fillings. She’s funny that way; I suppose having a professional chef in the house can do that to a girl.

The recipe itself worked like a charm, though. I made too much filling, since I made this up on the fly, uncertain of how much I’d need. There are worse things to have too much of. I’ve scaled it down a bit, and this should work swell (and relax, you can’t mess up filling):

2 oz bittersweet baking chocolate (either chips or bar)

2 oz cream cheese (1/4 standard package)

2 oz marmalade or jam

Double boil your baking chocolate and remove from heat, stir in the cream cheese. Spread chocolate cream cheese mixture onto rolled out dough. Slather marmalade on top of chocolate. Roll it up and refrigerate as recipe indicates.

The GF ingredients she recommends for this recipe are about the easiest thing to find just about anywhere. I ignored the “finely ground” part of the brown rice flour directive because of her lax attitude towards the types of GF flours one might use for this. I figured if she didn’t care about using other flours (which are very distinctly different from each other by the way), my Bob’s Red Mill stoneground brown rice flour was fine. 

Though she’s a stickler for a kitchen scale (further down in the post)—who has one of these anyway [twinge of jealousy]—I followed along bravely. Only scratching my head a couple times. Like when I wondered what to bake it on (opted for a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper) or why she didn’t tell me that rolling this sucker up would cause my overly filled interior to ooze out the sides and along the rolling edge. The cook time was also nearly double what she recommended. Ah well, recipes are really just a suggestion to get the ball rolling.

My dough-rolled layers are about double the thickness of hers, which explains the cook time. But I’m not sure how this happened (I even pulled out a ruler to measure the 10” round.)

Whatever, I made a right tasty rugelach with a sweetly tart filling using ingredients (except for the cream cheese) that I already had in the fridge/cupboard.

Happy ProcrastiKate.