Sorry to take so long to post – we are having trouble with our verizon internet and phone. They were able to fix the phone, but I guess the internet was trickier. So we have intermittent service at the moment.
The pop tart experiment has thus far gone great.
They were gobbled up; luckily we’re making more.
We did strawberry, raspberry and chocolate so far. The dough I found super easy to put together (with a cuisinart).
In the recipe, it calls for “coarse meal.” I had trouble getting the camera to focus properly, but the picture should give you some idea of what it should look like after you add the flour, sugar, salt and margarine. [Oh, and speaking of the recipe, I’m not a fan of “2 cups plus 2 tablespoons” of flour. First of all, the amount of flour in “one cup” is incredibly inaccurate. Weight is much more exact. Did you sift your flour? Did you spoon the flour into the cup? Did you just take your cup and put it into your flour bag and come out with a cup – did you use a knife to even off the top? All of these factors actually make a relatively large difference in the amount of flour. So I’m not sure those two extra tablespoons are necessary. I followed the recipe and put them in, but I am not convinced I needed to. Perhaps in the next batch I’ll leave the 2 tablespoons out and see what happens.]
I made a couple of changes after the first batch. Most importantly there was too much salt. I cut the salt by half and moved the sugar to a tablespoon.
The teaspoon of salt wasn’t so bad with the strawberry pop tart, but it overpowered the chocolate. I also put the dough in the freezer (instead of the hour in the fridge) to speed up the prep time.
I took the pop tart dough and added 1 tablespoon of cocoa for my chocolate pop tart dough. I used the chocolate dough for the smores as well. It makes the finished product darker (and more chocolatey).
My first attempt at the chocolate pop tart I only used chocolate chips as the filling. I don’t recommend this. The chocolate was too hard in the finished product.
Each batch results in 8 pop tarts. I found this to be not as many as I wanted (and we ate the all pretty quick) so in the next batch I folded each 3×5 rectangle in half and put filling in them so we would have more. And though fun, and smaller – they don’t look like pop tarts any more, so I’m going back to the bigger tarts.
The now preferred recipe for the Strawberry is adding 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of water to the preserves. This makes the preserves more substantial after cooking (I found my fruit filling to be thin after cooking).
If you forget to poke holes into the dough prior to cooking (which I kept doing) – the pop tart just doesn’t come out flat.
My second chocolate filling I like vastly better (although now I want to change the dough – this dough is a little too flaky for a pop tart). This filling (see below) resulted in a fudgy, much more pop tart like chocolate filling.
Chocolate Filling Recipe:
- 4 ounces (112 grams) chocolate
- 45 grams margarine (or 3 tablespoons)
- 2.5 Tablespoons of non dairy milk (rich’s whip, soy milk, rice milk, whatever you have)
- 2 Tablespoons sugar
- 1 lightly beaten egg
Melt chocolate and margarine. Add Rich’s whip (or whatever you are using) and sugar – mix. When chocolate mixture is cool to touch add egg.
Use approximately 1 tablespoon in your pop tarts (I try to overstuff mine – but be warned – this sometimes results in the filling coming out.
I then also used the chocolate filling for the smores pop tarts. I made 2 lines of chocolate filling with a line of marshmallow fluff in-between.
Preferred Recipes:
Pop Tart Dough
- 2 cups 2 tablespoons flour
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 sticks cold margarine
- 2 eggs
- 1 tablespoon cold water
Mix dry ingredients – then add the margarine and food process until coarse meal. Add eggs, food process until starts to come together and then I found I still had to add 1 tablespoon of water (when I added 2 tablespoons it was too much and had to add flour to make the dough less sticky).
Strawberry filling:
- 1/2 cup strawberry preserves
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch
- 1 tablespoon water
Mix water and cornstarch together and then add to the preserves and mix. Then put in middle of the pop tarts.
My husband and I shared a strawberry pop tart and a smores pop tart. By shared I mean, I had to taste both of the the minute Bracha dropped them off and left some over for my husband to have when he came home! They were delicious!! I’m not such a chocolate-based fan, so I prefered the strawberry, especially the yummy glaze on top! My husband loved the smores one, and the strawberry! I really liked the taste of the marshmallow fluff in the pop tart also! Thanks so much sweetandgoodcatering and keep up the yummy work!