Hot Fudge Rugelach with Cocoa Nib Chocolate Hazelnut Streusel

The hot fudge rugelach from Cookie Love were one of the top three cookies from this year's 12 days of cookies. It's difficult to give precise metrics (I didn't ask people to take a survey), but my co-workers raved about these rugelach due to their perfect salty-sweet balance, flaky soft texture, and evocation of nostalgic memories of grandma baking. Mindy Segal's hot fudge rugelach are not overly sweet, but just sweet enough to encourage eating multiple rugelach at once.

So don't let the long instructions and prep time dissuade you from making these amazing cookies. While these hot fudge rugelach may look daunting at first glance, the recipe is simple to execute and doesn't require a lot of actual hands-on work. Plan a day ahead and you can have these ready in under 40 minutes.

The cream cheese dough is a breeze to make as long as everything is room temperature. I refrigerated mine for a couple days, then made the streusel and the fudge sauce. Don't skip the freezer step for the nuts and chocolate. This keeps them intact instead of having the bottom layer turn to paste in the food processor. The salt in the streusel is part of what makes these so incredibly well-balanced, so be good to yourself and use a nice sea salt. The recipe for streusel made about 1 cup more than I found necessary. I opted to freeze the extra until I make these again, although now I'm thinking it would probably be great as the filling for breakfast rolls. The fudge sauce is a place where you should feel free to improvise. Maybe you don't want to make 4 cups worth of fudge sauce? Although who doesn't want extra chocolate? I used Nutella, Nutella on top of fudge sauce, or the fudge sauce from Baked Occasions. It was all similarly delicious.

I found rolling out the dough to be the most difficult step. It was easy to work with, but it was hard for me to get a perfect rectangle of long enough dimensions. Maybe I should have used the flour and flip trick (in the directions) more frequently. If you look at my photos, it's clear that my skinny ends of the cookies were points, rather than the blunt ends detailed in the recipe. Perfection in shape didn't seem to be a major requirement though, since these hot fudge rugelach aren't designed to be beautiful cookies, covered as they are with streusel and surrounded by melted, bubbled fudge sauce.

When covering the dough with the fudge sauce, do be certain the fudge isn't too warm. If it is warm, it will start to melt your soft cream cheese dough and you'll have difficulty rolling up the cookies (take it from someone who made that mistake). I chilled the too warm dough in order to roll it up off the parchment paper, but I must have let it chill too long, because that dough broke during rolling.

The first batch I made, I forgot the egg wash and the top layer of streusel. The hot fudge rugelach seemed to be browning rapidly, so I only baked them about 10-12 minutes total. This batch was okay, but there was a substantial improvement in complexity of flavor with the remainder of the cookies, which I did paint with egg wash and top with streusel. These baked exactly as stated in the recipe: 10 min, rotate, then bake another 5-8 min.

Original Source: Cookie Love

Hot Fudge Rugelach with Cocoa Nib Hazelnut Streusel

You'll need to plan ahead for these cookies, but the actual labor required is pretty minimal. The long prep time includes 45-60 minutes of occasionally stirring the hot fudge sauce - it's easy to multitask that with other things. While they're more complicated than your common cookie recipe, these hot fudge rugelach are so worth the time investment.

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Course: Dessert

Prep Time: 30 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour hour

Total Time: 1 hour hour 30 minutes minutes

Servings: 48 cookies

Ingredients

Cream Cheese Dough

• 1 cup 8 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
• 8 ounces cream cheese room temperature
• 1 ⁄3 cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon sea salt flakes

Hot Fudge Sauce*

• 3 cups heavy cream
• 13 ⁄4 cups granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons golden syrup e.g., Lyle’s or light corn syrup
• 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate coarsely chopped
• 1 1 ⁄2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 ⁄4 cup 2 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract

Streusel Topping

• 1 ⁄2 cup 2 1⁄2 ounces hazelnuts, toasted
• 1 ⁄2 cup 2 1⁄2 ounces milk chocolate pieces or discs (preferably 53% cacao)
• 2 tablespoons cocoa nibs
• 1 ⁄4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 ⁄4 cup light brown sugar firmly packed
• 1 ⁄4 cup dark brown sugar firmly packed
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 ⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 ⁄2 teaspoon sea salt flakes

Assembly

• 1 recipe Classic Cream Cheese Dough see above, divided in half and chilled
• 1 1 ⁄4 cups Hot Fudge see above, at a warm room temperature
• 1 extra-large egg white lightly beaten

Instructions

Cream Cheese Dough

• Using a mixer, beat the butter on medium speed to loosen it, about 5 to 10 seconds. Add the cream cheese and combine at medium speed, about 10 to 15 seconds. Add the sugar, beat on medium to aerate, about 3 minutes. The dough should look like and fluffy. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.
• Add the vanilla and both salts, mix briefly to incorporate. Scrape down the bowl again.
• Add the flour, mix on low speed until the dough just comes together, about 30 seconds. It should still look a bit shaggy.
• Bring the dough fully together by hand or with a bench scraper. Divide dough in half (each should way 14.5 ounces). Place each half on a separate piece of plastic wrap, pat the dough into a rectangle, wrap tightly and refrigerate at least 2 hours or up to 1 week.

Hot Fudge Sauce

• In a large (6-qt), heavy pot, combine the cream, sugar and syrup and cook over medium heat for about 3 minutes, until the sugar has dissolved.
• Add the chocolate and salt, bring to a boil. Immediately lower to a gentle simmer, and cook until the mixture breaks and oils begin separating from solids, about 40-45 minutes. Stir occasionally to avoid burning the bottom.
• Whisk in the butter and vanilla (or use an immersion blender to get the sauce really, really smooth). Let cool.
• Store in the refrigerator up to 6 months.

Streusel

• Freeze the toasted hazelnuts and chocolate pieces until thoroughly chilled, about 20 minutes.
• Using a food processor, pulse to grind the nuts and chocolate together. Add the cocoa nubs, sugars, flour, and salts; continue pulsing until mixture is the texture of a coarse meal (should take less than 10 pulses).

Assembly

• Place a 13 by 18-inch (same dimensions as a half sheet pan) piece of parchment paper on the work surface. Dust with flour. Unwrap one of the dough halves and place on top of the dusted paper.
• Roll the dough out until it forms a rectangle ending 1-inch from the edges of the parchment paper (12 by 17 inches). To prevent the dough from sticking, periodically dust the dough with flour, cover with another piece of parchment paper, and flip the dough (and paper) over. Peel off the top piece of parchment paper and continue rolling. Even out the edges with a bench scraper to straighten the rectangle. In the end, the dough should be just under ¼-inch thick.
• Repeat steps 1 and 2 with the second half of dough.
• Stack both rectangles of rolled out dough and refrigerate to chill, about 30 minutes.
• Heat the oven to 30 F. Line several half sheet pans with parchment paper.**
• Remove both sheets of dough from the fridge and peel off the parchment paper on top.***
• Evenly spread half the hot fudge sauce in a thin layer across each dough rectangle. (No need to leave a border along the edges.)
• For each dough sheet, sprinkle ½ cup of the streusel on top of the hot fudge layer.
• Trim the edges of your dough if you are going for perfection. Using a dough cutter or pizza wheel, divide each sheet in half lengthwise. From each long strip, move crosswise to cut out flat-tipped triangles, with a base of 1.5 inches wide and a tip of ¼ inch wide. You should get 12 triangles per strip (48 total).
• Separate a triangle from the rest of the dough (an offset spatula or bench scraper are perfect tools for this). Starting from the base, roll the triangle up like a croissant or crescent roll. Place it on the parchment papered-sheet pan, tip side up. Repeat roll-up process for remaining triangles, spacing them 2 inches apart on the prepared sheet pans (necessary for letting the hot fudge-streusel spread).
• Brush the tops of each rolled cookie with egg white, and sprinkle with the remaining (~1 cup) streusel.
• Bake only one pan at a time. Bake for 15 minutes, rotate, then bake another 5-10 minutes, until the hot fudge has oozed out and bubbled along the sides.
• Let the cookies cool completely on the sheet pan (or let cool 5 minutes, transfer entire sheet of parchment paper with cookies on top to a cooling rack, and reuse your pan). Repeat baking process with remaining dough.
• Rugelach will last 5 days in an airtight container at room temperature. Before adding the egg white wash, the rolled dough can be refrigerated for one week.

Notes

*Makes 4 cups, more than double what's required for recipe
**You can only bake one pan at a time, so essentially you need one pan readied for immediate baking and another series of pans or surfaces to hold the remaining rolled cookie dough while it waits its turn.
***Depending on the size of your work surface, you may need to work with one sheet at a time. Keep the other in the fridge until the first sheet is cut and rolled.