Sugary Goodness for the Holidays

I've run into many people who have never heard of kiffles, which just cracked me up since they've been a holiday tradition in my family as long as I can remember. If you're in the realm of those who've never experienced a kiffle, it's a pastry of Eastern European origin, filled with wonderful things like apricot, nuts, or even rasberry. Some kiffles are also filled with lekvar (prune butter), but I never acquired a taste for the prune variety. I'm told kiffles are similar to Kolacky or Kolache, although I've never experienced the latter to make a comparison. I'm not sure if they're well known outside of Southeastern Pennsylvania, but here, they're a popular holiday treat.

Yes, yes, enough of my blathering - on with the recipe.

Kiffle Dough
1c flour
1/4 lb butter, softened
3 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 egg
pinch salt

Combine the butter, cream cheese, and egg with a mixer. Add a pinch of salt to the flour and slowly add it to the butter, cheese and egg mixture. If the dough becomes too sticky to work with, mix it well by hand (i.e., plunge your hands right in there - take your mixer out first!). When it's all mixed up, separate the dough into large golfball sized balls, wrap each one in saran or wax paper, and refrigerate until firm. I usually let it in the fridge at least overnight.

When the dough is ready, dust your work surface with confectioner's sugar, take one of the balls of dough (leave the others in the fridge so they don't warm up), and roll it into a rough circular shape, rolling the dough out as thin as possible without it being too difficult to work with. Add more confectioner's sugar if it starts sticking to the rolling pin or your work surface. Cut the dough into pie slices (it helps if you don't cut it like a pizza - i.e., in half, quarters, etc, rather cut it as you would a pie). Spoon a small amount of filling (recipes follow) onto each slice, near the center. Don't use too much or else it'll bubble out during baking. You start to get a feel for how much you can use after a little bit. I used maybe between 1/2 and 3/4 tsp of filling per slice. Roll the slice, starting at the wide end. Place point-side down (the narrow end of the slice will end up on the outside of the roll, that's the side that goes down) on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet. Repeat with the rest of the dough balls and bake 15-18 minutes at 350F, rotating sheets once during baking. When they come out of the oven, you can dust them with more confectioner's sugar if you'd like.

Now for the fillings - I'll start with the easy one:
Apricot Filling
Go to the store and grab a jar of Apricot Butter. That's it, really. Make sure to get Apricot Butter, not jelly, jam, or preserves.

The following fillings require some mixing, but are well worth it. None of these have exact amounts, mostly due to the fact that when my father was showing me how to make nut filling, he said, "Make it look like this", as he showed me the contents of his mixing bowl.

Nut Filling
Traditionally, nut filling in kiffles is made with walnuts. Although nut kiffles are my absolute favorite, I was never really crazy about walnuts. Go figure. Anyway, I tried the recipe with pecans, and it works well. So take your pick - what kind of nut are you? Or go completely nuts and make both. OK, enough with the nut jokes.

Crush/chop a regular sized bag of walnuts or pecans finely. Add granulated sugar and light cream until the mixture resembles a wet paste. I find it easier to just add a couple of teaspoons of sugar, then slowly add cream until it's the right consistency. Give it a taste and add more sugar if you'd like. It's not really rocket science, just end up with something that tastes good to you!

Other Fruit Fillings
If you're lucky enough to find other fruit butters, you can modify them a bit to use them as kiffle filling, too. I say "lucky" because it took looking through the jams, jellies, preserves and butters at 5 different grocery stores to find what I was looking for. I found it at Wegman's, the grand poobah of grocery stores. There's one close to where I work, and I love the place. It was there I found raspberry butter and strawberry butter.

These butters don't behave like apricot butter - they are more fluid when baked in kiffles. As a result, they tend to run all over the place. But if you really want raspberry or strawberry kiffles, don't despair! While you're at the store grabbing those delicious fruit butters, grab yourself a box of puff pastry dough.

Bake around a 4"x4" square of puff pastry according to the package directions. After it's cooled, crumble it up into a bowl. Add a couple of scoops of the fruit butter and mix it up. You want a good, moist but not wet consistency. Give it a taste and add a little granulated sugar if it's too tart.

The puff pastry helps bind the butter together so it doesn't run all over the place when the kiffles are baking.

That's it! Lots of kiffle-y goodness, right there for you to make.

As you can probably see by the amount of flour in the recipe, it doesn't make that many. Well, maybe it depends on your perspective. I'd say this recipe makes dough for about 35-40 kiffles. In my case, I've already made a little of each filling, and after tasting the nutty goodness of my favorite nut kiffles, I realized I had only 5 of those kind left.

I always saw making kiffles as a daunting task - and it is, no question about it. You have this little ball of dough that you spend all the time to roll out, cut, put a little bit of filling on, roll up, and place on a cookie sheet. And after spending that time, you realize there's only about 7-8 cookies on that sheet, and you've got to do it all again and again to fill up the entire sheet just to get it in the oven! I made a double batch of dough this past Saturday night, and spent from about 10AM until 3PM Sunday baking them. But I'm telling you, it's worth it. So after you're all done baking, your kitchen is cleaned up (make sure to look for powdered sugar on the floor, I'm telling you this from experience), daylight is fading, and your tree lights are twinkling, sit yourself down with a cup of hot chocolate and some kiffles and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

We hope you all have a wonderful Holiday season!
Joanne and Cragar
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