Homemade Pop-Tarts

These were quite delicious. The dough was very easy to work with but I was well on my way to forming the size of rectangle printed in the recipe before I realized that there must be an error. (There was, and the correction was on the Flour website. I think the error has been corrected in subsequent printings of the book). Because I had rolled my dough thinner than the recipe intended, I made 10 tarts. I tried two of the fillings and glazes: raspberry with vanilla glaze and chocolate with chocolate glaze. Both glazes seemed overly sweet to me taken on their own, but balanced nicely with the fillings in the end. The pastry baked up very crisp and flaky. Apart from the printing error, my one complaint is that the pastries were a little greasy for a hand-held treat. Did my over-rolling/working of the dough contribute to this? I guess I'll have to make them again to find out.

I held out making this recipe because I thought it would be labour intensive -- wrong! I was amazed at how easy it was to prepare the Pate Brisee I (there are 2 Pate Brisee recipes in the book). I would just recommend using a high quality jam. These are not overly sweet, although I drizzled the icing on the pop tarts rather than completely covering them. I suspect they would freeze well and they could be brought out for special breakfasts on an as needed basis.

They were flaky, delicious, and much better than the cardboard version that inspired them!

Since the Pate Brisee recipe was so simple, I ended up making a second batch and used it for pie dough. It did shrink more than my favourite crust (I did chill to reduce shrinking), but given it's simplicity, I will consider using it again.