Homemade Pop Tarts - A Delicious Disaster

My oldest son and I decided to try making our own version of his favorite food - a pop tart. There are countless do-it-yourself pop tart recipes available online, but they all seem to have a central theme. Basically, a homemade pop tart is just some sort of filling, such as your favorite jam, wrapped in pie crust, and drizzled with a powdered sugar and milk glaze. I figured we could probably handle that.


I had been wanting to try out a new pie crust recipe, that my mother picked up at her last women's retreat, which uses mayonnaise instead of butter. So, we plunged right in. Since we rolled our pie crust out between two sheets of wax paper, we avoided the flour mess that normally keeps me away from pie making (another little tip from the women's retreat).


We rolled our dough into a rectangle, and then cut it into smaller rectangles.



We added our filling. We decided to try three different fillings: strawberry jam, chocolate chips, and a sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter mixture (the picture is a little blurry, because the camera lense, like everthing else in the kitchen, was smudged with sugar).


Once the filling was in place, we folded the dough over it.


Then we transferred our pop tarts to a cookie sheet, and sealed them shut with a fork.


We baked them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 17 minutes. While they were still hot from the oven, we drizzled them with our powder sugar glaze. We added some cinnamon to the glaze for our brown sugar pop tarts, and some vanilla and baking cocoa for our chocolate ones. That turned out pretty well, except that I did my usual too much milk, more sugar, too much milk routine until we had four times too much glaze.


Our recipe only made about six pop tarts, but I think we could have managed a batch of eight, if we'd rolled our crust a little thinner. That would probably be preferable anyway, though the mayonnaise crust did turn out light and flakey as promised. I cut all the pastries up so the the children, and their father and I, could sample a little of each. The children preferred the brown sugar and cinnamon, but did agree that the strawberry, tasted very much like the real thing too.

Of course, there was the little matter of the clean-up. Happily, we got to the dishes before the sugar rush wore off, so it was quick work. That's really the key to most of our life - get the work done before the sugar wears off!

It's great to be a homeschooler!