Turn Crescent Rolls Into A Sweet Treat With Just One Extra Ingredient

Crescent rolls are an easy and quick dish to round out your dinner. You can also use them to make appetizers by turning them into homemade pigs in blankets. One way you might not have thought to use them, however, is as a dessert. Given that they're usually a savory dish, you might think you need to make plenty of tweaks to transform them into a sweet treat. That's not true, as you only need a single ingredient – jam. 

To create this dessert, you first need one can of crescent roll dough. You can also make the dough yourself if you're feeling fancy, but that's a time-consuming task compared to this method. Lay out the triangles of dough, and brush about 2 teaspoons of jam or jelly of your choice over the surface. You can add a little extra along the center edge if you want your crescents to be extra jelly-filled. Then, roll them up as usual and bake as per the instructions on the packaging. What you'll get is a treat that's lightly fruity, sweet, and a great way to cap off a meal.

Doing this only adds a minute or two to your usual prep time, but there are other ways to upgrade this hack. You can make some icing and drizzle it across the top for an additional pop of sweetness. If you want to add fresh fruits, put some along the long end of the triangle so you end up with plenty of filling. For a peanut, butter, and jelly rendition, add peanut butter in the center. You can also fold the corners instead of creating a crescent shape to change up the appearance.

While this is an unexpected way to use canned crescent rolls, this dessert actually has a long history and is popular all over Europe. Dough rolled and shaped into crescents exists in numerous cultures and often comes paired with sweet fruit or jams. Poland has the rogaliki, and Czech has the povidlové šátečky, both of which have been around for hundreds of years.

Perhaps the oldest of these moon-shaped treats dates back to the 13th century in Austria. This pastry, called a kifle, or a kifla, as featured on "Schitt's Creek," didn't always feature jam, but often does now. They would sometimes be filled with nuts or seeds instead, and could be served with jam as a side. To this day, some hundred-year-old recipes are passed down through families on how to make jam-filled kifli. These can be a labor of love and take hours to make from scratch, unlike the canned crescent roll alternative.

One of the big advantages of the modern iteration is that you can make tons quickly and enjoy them slowly over time. When stored at room temperature in an airtight container, these jam crescent rolls can last up to two days. However, you can freeze them for up to three months, then reheat them in a toaster oven, air fryer, or microwave for a quick sweet bite on the go. They make an excellent addition to large group brunches, fancy tea parties, and picnics. So, perhaps it's time to stop thinking of crescent rolls as a savory dish and start giving them a little sugar.