Real Food! Poptarts

  I never was crazy about poptarts as a kid. I didn't even get the 'real' ones anyway- I got 'Toast'ums'. My hubby likes the brown sugar & cinnamon flavored ones. They have to be THE Poptart brand. That was fine, I could always find them on sale, usually had coupons, and would stock up.
  But then I guess last summer is when it happened. My brother was here alot. He likes poptarts (because I honestly don't think mom buys them for him at all!) They were his food of preference. My kids wanted them everytime he ate them. I'd rather have him eat my junk than healthy food anyway, and everyone left my hubby's brown sugar & cinnamon ones alone.
  Then I fell into this baking everything from scratch frenzy. I'm getting comfortable replacing our families baked staples (ok, whole wheat bread) so I decided to look for a poptart recipe.
 There are MANY!  They all were essentially the same. I solicited recipes and advice from my domestic oriented friends on Facebook.
   I finally decided on this recipe from the '100 Days of Real Food' blog. Seemed simple enough.
   I embarked on this baking adventure in the middle of the night- after I'd put the 2 little kids down, took a shower, got all the ingredients set out for some marathon baking. It's mid-August. The last thing I want to do is fire up the oven, but if I'm going to, I'm going to bake several things.
  The poptarts required the most work, so I left those for last.
  Since I linked the recipe, I'm not going to post it here. It will force you to go to the other blog and maybe you'll find something else you like there.
  So the recipe called for using a food processor with the dough blade. I happen to have a fp that my grandma didn't want anymore. It had one blade- one side for slicing, 1 for shredding. I first started out with my hand mixer with just 1 paddle. Mixing dry flour and cold diced butter wasn't working with the mixer, so I switched to the fp, and it made mush of my butter, so I switched back to mixing bowl. It was working, slowly but surely. I finally got frustrated and dumped all the remaining 1 1/2 sticks of butter into the bowl and microwaving it to melt it. I mixed it from there. It seemed a little dry so I added some tap water til I got a good doughy ball. (That was my only real straying from the recipe- It's not that I can't follow directions- if I can find a short cut or eliminate some steps, I will.)
   My floured surface was my kitchen table, and I used white flour for thats. I rolled and cut and spooned homemade blueberry jam onto the dough. Used a spatula to scrape it up & transfer it to my baking pan. I didn't have parchment paper, so I used a silicone baking mat on a cookie sheet.
   I ended up with 7 pastries total, all different sizes. I baked for around 20 minutes, then turned the oven off and let them sit in the oven while I worked on putting together my first baking project from that baking marathon.
  I tried one last night, but I was so full and so tired of looking at all the baked goodies so I went to bed. They were delightful this AM.
  I was very pleased with the texture of my crust too. It was flaky, but not too crumby. Not something I would want to eat as a breakfast meal- maybe to go with my coffee.
    The moment of truth was when we were talking about poptarts this morning, and my 3 yr old said she wanted one, I presented her with one. She looked at it carefully, took a bite and said "BLECH! Not that poptart. I want a white one."
  The baby eyed them carefully before taking a bite. She ate them. But she usually eats anything we give her, except for cherry tomatoes.
   My hubby ate half of one. He didn't rave about it. But he also didn't tell me what he usually thinks of my cooking :-)
  My 9 yr old refuses to try them for some reason. So it's all good. More for me. These baking experiments won't be doing my waist or hips any good, I can tell already.
  So was it cost efficient? Probably. I used homemade jam from blueberries that I picked myself for free off of our neighbors bush (they invited me... I didn't just sneak over to the fence and reach thru and pick them haha!) I buy butter in bulk at the club store. I have my own chickens, so I have my own eggs. I could have done without the salt. Next time I will omit the salt anyway. Cost of electricity. These could probably be easily baked in a solar-oven. If you omit the egg wash, you wouldn't have to worry about them getting 'done' enough. Although they wouldn't be good if they weren't done.
  The only problem, with any baking project is the time to roll out, cut, etc. And the clean up. Will I make them again? Probably. Not every week though. 
  Are you going to give them a shot? Let me know how that goes for you! In the meantime, I might look at some different recipes and give those a shot.