Rugelach- the ultimate "pastry" cookie!

Cooking with sour cream is a Central European tradition with its roots in the Middle East. Cakes, pastries and cookies combining sour cream with fruits, jams, nuts and spices are specialties of this part of the world. According to food historians, contemporary Jewish-American Rugelach (frequently made with cream cheese) descends from this tradition.
These cookies are known by different names in different countries: Kipfel from Germany, Kifli from Yugolsavia and cream cheese cookies from the United States. Basically Rugelach is made in one of two ways. The dough is either made from sour cream and has yeast added for leaving or it is made with cream cheese and eggs are the primary leavening ingredient. Presumably, the first recipes for Rugelach-type pastries were introduced to America by immigrants from Hungary, Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia and other neighboring countries.
Most of these immigrants were Jewish.
Basically crescent-shaped cookies that comes from the Yiddish word "rugel" (royal), they are also called Kipfel, cheese Bagelach, and cream-cheese horns of plenty in this country. Traditional Rugelach dough is usually rolled out into 12"-16" circles, depending on the recipe, cut into pie shapes, covered with nuts, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon and then rolled up like crescents. It can also be rolled out into a rectangle, covered with filling, rolled up, and cut into circles. The American addition to Rugelach was cream cheese and a variety fillings used today. The cream-cheese dough may have been developed by the Philadelphia Cream Cheese Company because the dough is often called Philadelphia cream-cheese dough. "One of the the early cream-cheese doughs appeared in The Perfect Hostess, written in 1950 by Mildred Knopf. Mrs. Knopf, the sister-in-law of Alfred Knopf the publisher, mentioned that the recipe came from Nela Rubenstein, the wife of the famous pianist Arthur Rubenstein. It was Mrs. Knopf's friend Maida Heatter who put rugelah on the culinary map with Mrs. Heatter's grandmother's recipe. It is the most sought after of all Mrs. Heatter's recipes and is the Rugelach most often found in upscale bakeries nationwide."
Jewish Cooking in America, Joan Nathan [Alfred A. Knopf:New York] 1998