Part Cookie, Part Pastry, All Delicious! Malted Milk Chocolate Rugelach

December 13, 2023·19 min·1 clip

Jesse Sefchik reveals her malted milk chocolate arugula cookie recipe, blending nostalgic milkshake flavors with a playful twist.

Jesse Szefchik hosts this episode of Play Me A Recipe from her Brooklyn kitchen to demonstrate her malted milk chocolate rugelach recipe. The recipe combines a cookie-like dough with a sweet, spiced filling for a hybrid pastry. Szefchik mentions her baker friend Ben, who influenced her to use both pronunciations "rugelach" and "rugula." The dough requires all-purpose flour, granulated sugar, malted milk powder, salt, cold butter, and cold cream cheese, processed together until a soft mass forms. The filling blends milk chocolate, additional malted milk powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, cinnamon, and salt into a coarse, sandy texture. Szefchik emphasizes chilling the divided dough for at least two hours to ensure it's firm enough to roll and cut cleanly. She rolls each chilled half into an 11-by-7-inch rectangle on a heavily floured surface before trimming the edges for neatness. The filling is sprinkled evenly over the dough, leaving a half-inch border at the top and bottom, which is then brushed with egg wash to act as glue. The dough is rolled tightly from the bottom into a log, similar to cinnamon rolls, with extra egg wash brushed underneath each roll to secure it. The assembled logs require a second chill in the freezer for one hour to prevent the spirals from smushing during slicing. Before baking, the chilled logs are brushed with more egg wash, generously coated with coarse sanding sugar, and sliced into one-and-a-half-inch pieces. A surprising insight is that the dough's softness necessitates a heavily floured surface for rolling, contrary to the typical "lightly floured" instruction. Szefchik notes the malted milk powder imparts a nostalgic, caramely flavor reminiscent of Whoppers candies or diner milkshakes, which is central to the cookie's character. She shares a pro tip: brushing the clean underside of the dough with egg wash during rolling creates extra adhesion for a secure spiral. The baked cookies achieve a unique texture described as somewhere between a biscuit, pie dough, and a cookie—not quite one or the other. The episode maintains an instructional, conversational tone as Szefchik guides listeners through each step in real time. The style is practical and encouraging, with troubleshooting advice for potential issues like dough sticking or logs breaking. Home bakers seeking a detailed, project-style recipe with a nostalgic flavor profile would enjoy this episode. Listeners looking for quick, simple recipes or those without a food processor might find the process too involved.

As heard by us

A cozy bake-along for malted milk chocolate rugelach, with practical assembly detail and a nostalgic cookie-pastry finish.

Malted milk chocolate rugelach gets a warm apartment-kitchen bake-along, with Jesse Sefchik moving from dough and filling to chilling, egg wash, coarse sugar, and the first too-warm bite.

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Why you'd press play

You want a cookie project with a diner-milkshake vibe and a neat spiral on the tray.

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