I will readily admit that Pop Tarts were one of my favorite childhood foods. I only ate the strawberry variety, with the red jammy filling, hard white frosting, and multi-colored crunchy sprinkles. Most of the time I ate them cold, straight out of the box -- because although a warm Pop Tart is delicious, I was never patient enough to wait for them to cool off after coming out of the toaster, so I would inevitably burn my mouth. Homemade toaster pastries seem to be trendy of late, and I've seen a lot of different recipes floating around. I decided to try Joanne Chang's recipe for "Homemade Pop-Tarts" from her cookbook Flour.
The dough for Chang's Pop Tarts is a pate brisee. You combine flour, sugar, and salt in a stand mixer, and toss in some cubed cold butter and mix until there are small butter pieces throughout. Then you add egg yolks and cold milk. You dump out the dough, gather it into a mound, and use palm of your hand to work through it, smearing the butter chunks into the dough (watch a video of Joanne making the dough here). Then you gather up the dough and chill it for at least four hours.
I chilled my dough for a day and found it very easy to handle and roll out -- no sticking, tearing, or stretching. To make the Pop Tarts, you roll out half of the dough, brush it with a beaten egg, cut it into rectangles, and top each rectangle with two tablespoons of jam. Then you roll out the rest of the dough and cut in into matching rectangles, lay them on top, and press to adhere. You bake the pastries until golden brown, and after they are cool, top the pastries with a vanilla glaze made from powdered sugar, vanilla, and water. I used a toaster pastry press from Williams Sonoma (impulse purchase because it was on sale) to cut out my Pop Tarts, so they had a nice scalloped edge.
As you can see from the photo above, Chang's homemade version of Pop Tarts has one striking difference from the real thing -- the homemade dough is very flaky. Despite the physical resemblance, someone tasting the homemade version would never mistake it for a real Pop Tart, because the flaky crust makes the pastries a lot closer to a hand pie. But if your goal is merely to produce adorable, delicious pastry and not necessarily achieve Pop Tart verisimilitude, then these definitely fit the bill! Yum!
Recipe: "Homemade Pop-Tarts" from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe, by Joanne Chang, recipe available here (with video!).
The dough for Chang's Pop Tarts is a pate brisee. You combine flour, sugar, and salt in a stand mixer, and toss in some cubed cold butter and mix until there are small butter pieces throughout. Then you add egg yolks and cold milk. You dump out the dough, gather it into a mound, and use palm of your hand to work through it, smearing the butter chunks into the dough (watch a video of Joanne making the dough here). Then you gather up the dough and chill it for at least four hours.
I chilled my dough for a day and found it very easy to handle and roll out -- no sticking, tearing, or stretching. To make the Pop Tarts, you roll out half of the dough, brush it with a beaten egg, cut it into rectangles, and top each rectangle with two tablespoons of jam. Then you roll out the rest of the dough and cut in into matching rectangles, lay them on top, and press to adhere. You bake the pastries until golden brown, and after they are cool, top the pastries with a vanilla glaze made from powdered sugar, vanilla, and water. I used a toaster pastry press from Williams Sonoma (impulse purchase because it was on sale) to cut out my Pop Tarts, so they had a nice scalloped edge.
This recipe yields eight pastries, and I baked mine in two batches of four. For the first batch, I filled each pastry with 2 tablespoons of strawberry jam (homemade by my friend Kelly with delicious strawberries from Michigan -- thank you!). I used a fork to crimp around the edges of each pastry before baking, but each of the pastries had a significant amount of jam leak out during baking. For the second batch, I reduced the amount of filling to just over one tablespoon, and took extra care to crimp even more carefully -- but I still had some jam leakage. I'm not sure why I had this problem, but I think that the pastries I filled with more jam had a better filling-to-crust ratio than the ones with less. I want to try making these again and seeing if I can figure out how to prevent the filling from leaking out; I'm also interested in putting in some fresh fruit along with jam.
Recipe: "Homemade Pop-Tarts" from Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe, by Joanne Chang, recipe available here (with video!).
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