My Berry Pop Tart Misadventure

If you’re tired of blogposts about everyone else’s gorgeous and fabulously successful baking, this could be the antidote.  Read it and you’ll never worry again about whether you have created the world’s least sophisticated and most ridiculous looking baked good.  I have that crown and I’m not giving it up easily.

I’ve been irrational before, but this adventure may take the cake – or at least land me in the Baketogether amateur Cakewrecks Hall of Fame.  The only reason  I don’t qualify for the “real” Cakewrecks is that I’m not a professional cake baker and no one paid a fee for these.

In her post on this month’s Baketogether challenge, Very Berry Mini Pies, Abby mentioned that a pop tart variation.  That was all I needed to go back to my pre-adolescent junk food fantasies.  I couldn’t get pop tarts out of my mind and began planning how I would make them.

I could give you a sob story about how the 100 degree day caused all my problems, but I’m prefer personal responsibility to whining.  So in that spirit, here are a few mistakes you don’t need to make yourself if you learn from my experience.

• Amount of dough – How could the amount of dough that made 6 open-faced mini pies be enough for 6 two-sided pop tarts?  It couldn’t.  I should have doubled the dough – or halved the filling.  It’s simple math – duh!

• Making pastry on a blisteringly hot day – Don’t do it.  Even by the Baketogether rules, I could have waited to the end of the month, but that’s not my style.  I was not about to delay my planned pop tarts simply because I could have fried the dough on the sidewalk outside my house.  I do have air conditioning, but being my father’s daughter, I can’t crank it up simply because I had pastry to make.

• Rolling out dough – Two sheets of parchment work best for rolling out dough thinly and moving it.  I started rolling it out on a Roupat mat and had to change over when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get the dough off the mat in anything resembling decent form.

• Adding too much filling – Do you ever start something and have a little bird on your shoulder whispering “wait a minute, don’t do it like that” or “whoa, easy – you’re about to go down a disastrous road – turn back now”?  I heard that voice, but continued to pile filling into the pop tarts even though I could tell I wouldn’t be able to close them cleanly.  

• Moving a filled tart that has no supporting pan –  Not a good idea.  Need I say more?  

But now for the good news.  If you wonder whether this dish can be saved, the answer is a qualified yes.

• I moved from the Roulpat to parchment and that helped.  (Thank you Gail, for reminding me that parchment works wonders!) 

• After a pathetic attempt to move the first pop tart to the cookie sheet, I kept the remaining ones on the parchment and moved them to the cookie sheet on the paper.    

• I switched to tartlettes for my last bit of dough.  (I only had enough for 1½ tarts, so the second one didn’t have dough on the sides.)  The form helped and when I added crushed, slivered almonds, things began looking up, at least aesthetically.  

• I pried the pop tarts off the sheet,iced them, and added colored sugar because, after all, who doesn’t like colorful candy that reminds them of being a kid?   

Biting into a messy pop tart, I was reminded that, as in much else in life, when it comes to food, appearance is not the whole story.  I may wait for cooler weather, but pop tart of my dream, you haven’t seen the last of me!