At 200 calories each, and with no redeeming nutritional value, Pop Tarts are horrible brown food. However… sometimes I crave them. Probably a childhood comfort food thing.

Making them myself probably won’t make them any less calorific, or more nutritious, but at least they’ll be home made!

I’m going to follow a recipe from Leite’s Cullinaria, but convert into the metric system before starting! Plus I’m going to do half jam filling, and half chocolate:

• Pastry
  • 250g plain flour
  • 30g icing sugar
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 140g unsalted butter
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 100ml milk (although I only used about 60ml)
• Jam filling
  • 100g jam
  • 1 tsp corn flour
  • 1 egg, whisked
  • Glaze
    • 60g icing sugar
    • 2 tsp milk
    • 1 tsp syrup
    • 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
    • sprinkles
• Chocolate filling
  • Nutella :)
  • Glaze
    • 30g icing sugar
    • 30g cocoa powder
    • 3 tsp milk
    • 1 tsp syrup
    • chocolate sprinkles

Make the pastry as you’d expect: mix dry, cut in butter, add liquids to form dough, then chill. As I noted I only used about 60ml of milk to bring the dough together, and it still seems really wet. We’ll see how that works…

For the jam filling, heat everything on the hob until it starts to bubble, then leave to cool. Mine was lumpy from the cornflour, so I strained it through a sieve.

Roll out the dough and cut into rectangles, put in the fillings, put water on the edges and crimp the edges with a fork to seal. Prick the tarts with a fork. Chill while the oven heats up to 170C fan.

See the little bit of pastry on one tray? That means it’s the jam tray. Why am I mentioning this? Because I’ll forget what it means unless I put it in the draft of this post! And then after cooking Soph ate the extra bit of pastry… so who knows what we’ll get when we bite into them!

Bake for 16-18 minutes, turning half way through. I ended up giving mine 20 minutes, as they looked rather anaemic even after 18 minutes. Cool on a rack.

When cool add the glazes and sprinkles.

So… the chocolate glaze was too strong. Less cocoa, more sugar needed. Also the jam filling… the egg was to seal the pastry, not mix in with the jam! Oops! Apart form that… all good fun :)