Off to a good start!

My first Tuesdays With Dorie post and I'm writing it on a Wednesday. Shame on me,

I started with much greater aspirations, in fact, I baked this recipe a whole week and a half early because I was so excited. I'm full of creativity in the kitchen, but writing, oh that's a different story. Anyway, one day late isn't so bad- I did much worse with assignments in college.

Before I dig into the adventures in Rugelach baking, I should explain how I got started on this exciting new adventure. It all started one sunny summer afternoon, when I pawned off a bag full of fresh garden tomatoes to my new neighbor, Patty. It turns out, the day I passed the bag of tomatoes over the fence happened to be the same day that Patty as ready to cook her Fridays with Dorie recipe that happened to require a bunch of tomatoes. We got to talking about this neat blogging community she belongs to, and how much fun Patty and her mother have, cooking and blogging through Dorie's books. I was intrigued, and to say I didn't go right inside and google 'Tricia and nanna Fridays with Dorie " would be the lie of all lies. I checked it out, and a few other blogs. I planned on grabbing myself the book to give it a try. But alas, like most great plans I put together in my little pea brain, it vanished within days.

That is, until I got a knock on the door a few weeks ago, Patty and her family had moved out of the house next door but stopped by with a gift, Dorie's newest book! I was quick to make myself a blog page, and run to the store for ingredients, and I baked those suckers within hours of getting the book. 

So here I sit, a week and a half later, with wine in hand, and Rugelach gone days ago (they were a hit!) 

Let's get to the good stuff, the pictures!

I'm no baker, so when I saw that the first recipe I'd be making had no pictures as reference I took it as a challenge. I refused to give in to the temptation of googling some pictures. I wanted to see how well I could follow directions (turns out, not so well, but they still came out just fine!)

Ah,my favorite part of cooking- putting all the ingredients out and taking pictures of them. In the past they just sat on my phone- now they have a home!

This dough was so easy, and it turned out so flakey! It almost made it look like I knew what I was doing!

I got inspired by the filling and made myself a fancy chocolate cherry pecan coffe. Let's talk about how cute my mug is...

This first batch I somehow misread the directions and ended up using half the amount of dough I was supposed to, resulting in really thin dough and a slightly burnt first batch, that just gave me and excuse to eat those first.

Final product! So cute! I think I cut them a little short, but that just made them that much easier to pop into my mouth in one bite.

Because of my miscalculation I ended up with extra dough, but not enough filling. So I made these little  punks. I filled them with raspberry jam and chopped pecans, I REALLY liked these!

So that's it! I've already made a plan to sucker my mom and aunt into helping me with the Buche de Noel recipe, that one looks like a doozy!