Homemade Pop Tarts

This past week has been a really busy for one for me, but in the best way. After a week at home last week for Easter, I set off back to Cambridge on Monday to start lectures again, only to go to London that same night to stay at a friends for the London Book Fair, Tuesday to today. I love a few days at other peoples houses, especially when it's a girly group and we can do those classic girly things like face masks. I wonder if Sarah will ever truly forgive me for dropping a dark brown coloured one all over her bathroom floor though!

Spillages aside, I had a great week, and the London Book Fair was enjoyable madness. Some of you may already know I'm currently studying (and coming close to the end of) an MA in Publishing, so the book fair was a bit of a school trip I suppose to scout out publishers we're interested in and attend a few seminars on the future of the industry and how we can all make ourselves more employable. As
with all these events, the answer to that latter point is get digital, digital, DIGITAL!

I'm feeling suitably digital right now as I type away on my laptop and edit photographs, which are actually making me feel more peckish than anything! I had to leave my homemade pop tarts behind when I set off for my week away and I came home with a craving to an empty tin. But at least it's an excuse for me to make more of these delicious pockets of sugary joy - they're already in high demand by my friends!

I got the idea for the pop tarts from a Pinterest post when I was browsing around for something to bake during my week at home. We had most of the ingredients in already, so all that was left to get was some jam. My mum grabbed me some on her morning shop the next day and I got baking ASAP because I couldn't wait to try my hand at the recipe.

Before I get into my do's and don't's for this, (and there are a few don't's I came across while baking!), let me speak to my UK readers. The recipe on Pinterest is American and asks for "half and half" which I actually had to Google because I had no idea what that was - if you're in the UK, ignore this! Just make some standard glacier icing with icing sugar and water that's nice and thick and gloopy.

If you're American, do carry on with your strange ingredients...

Way before you need that icing, though, you need to make the biscuit base. It's an easy peasy process, and super fast if you use a food processor like the recipe recommends, but when you come across the "chill in the fridge for an hour" section, be careful! I left mine in for dot on the hour, and when I pulled it out it was almost rock solid and completely impossible to roll. I had to leave it out for another half an hour before I could even think about rolling it. I recommend half an hour at most in the fridge, maybe even less if yours is set particularly cold.

Rolling was easy after I'd got it to room temperature. Making the rectangles was a little time consuming, but they just be because I got a ruler out and actually measured them 8 x 12cm for every one. I completely disregarded the recipes measurements on this (mostly because I got confused after two sets of numbers were thrown at me in a row - maths in not my forté...) and guessed the general size of a pop tart. Mine came out the perfect size in the end, so improvisation is sometimes best!

Another time consuming part of this recipe was popping the jam filled and sealed pop tarts in the freezer for 2+ hours (I put mine in for 3), but it gave me time to get other things done around the house, which is never a bad thing!

Once your frozen tarts are, well... frozen, into the oven they go. I found 25 minutes was a perfect time, so they were getting golden brown, but not too dark or too crispy they were solid. This all depends on how thick you made your rectangles though, as I thought mine were quite thin but rose up to be relatively thick. This rising process, by the way (as the recipe actually says too) can cause your jam to leak out, no matter how well you think you've sealed the edges. While I didn't have mass explosion of jam, next time I bake I'm going to make the top rectangle of my biscuit dough slightly bigger than the bottom and fold the excess around and under the bottom of the bottom one... if that made sense!?

Any way you do it, really do press your edges down, and if you do have leaks, so be it - baking is a messy process after all!

Now onto that icing. I made my glacier icing especially thick so it was spreadable, but wouldn't just run off the edges of the pop tart. Put a big, hefty dollop of it on there, and decorate before it sets. I sprinkled on some fruity confetti  which a) smelled great and b) tasted great. You could go wild if you wanted, though, and add hundreds and thousands, writing icing, or even melt some chocolate and wave it over with a spoon for some ambitious designs.

If you want to get really creative, why not try a chocolate biscuit base, different flavour jams inside or maybe a bit of Nutella? I'll be making these again very soon probably, as a fun bake, and I'll try new combinations until I find the perfect one.

What would you try?