Christmas baking

Every year at Christ­mas, one of the fam­i­ly treats is a sweet li’l treat that we’ve always known sim­ply as “Jew­ish pas­try”. This year I decid­ed I’d like to take a crack at mak­ing it, and faced my first obsta­cle: How do you google a treat that you know by such a gener­ic (and cer­tain­ly incor­rect) name?

So I punched “jew­ish pas­try” into Google’s help­ful lit­tle box, and got how­ev­er many thou­sands of returns. Can­ny crit­ter that I am, I had a look at the image search results. Turns out the prop­er name for “Jew­ish pas­try” is rugelach.

Armed with that knowl­edge, I tried hunt­ing for rugelach in Google. And dis­cov­ered that there are as many recipes for rugelach as there are Jew­ish grand­moth­ers. Hmmm.

So I emailed my mom, and got our iter­a­tion of the recipe from her. It came from my great-aunt Olga, who is on the Ukrain­ian side of the family.

Right now the dough’s chill­ing in the fridge. Soon I’ll be dab­bing straw­ber­ry jam onto tri­an­gles of dough and rolling them up and bak­ing them. Hope­ful­ly it turns out.

Wish me luck!