Gluten-Free Pop-Tarts

Adventures in pastry and pop-tart making. Chapter 1.

I was sitting at home, working, while cartoons played in the background. I wasn’t paying much attention until the Pop-Tarts commercial came on. It hit me like a freight train… I wanted a Pop-Tart and I wanted one bad.

My life as a celiac means that when I crave something like this, I have to make it. Fine, no biggie. Can’t be *that* difficult. I decided to do them two ways: baked and deep-fried.

I started with a batch of my pie crust. I make this with cold butter, GF flour blend, some salt, an egg, and cold water. The egg is necessary to give the dough some strength and structure. W/out it, it tends to crumble into oblivion. Cut the butter into small pieces and drop on top of the flour and salt. Process in short bursts until it’s mostly incorporated. Drop in the egg and water and process until thoroughly blended and dough forms ball.

Once the dough was ready, I got everything set up. I had some cherry preserves, rolling mat, rolling pin, flour, egg wash, sugar, pizza cutter, flipper.

I broke the dough into ping pong size balls and rolled until smooth. Flattened slightly and then rolled into a rectangle form. Here is where the pizza cutter came in – I trimmed off the edges so I had a nicely shaped rectangle. On one end of the rectangle I dropped a few teaspoons of the cherry preserves and spread them out, avoiding the edges.

Then I folded the dough over and crimped down the edges. Using a fork you can make a nice pattern as well as helping to seal the top and bottom pieces of pastry. Cut a slit or two into the top and brush with a beaten egg. This helps promote browning as this pastry does not brown much on its own.

Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes or until nicely browned. I learned from the first sheet out and crimped the bottom/top of each tart together more securely. The preserves came out and made a red lake with the tarts as islands. Sticky and gooey. (But still delicious!)

This was the first batch out. In hindsight, they could have baked a bit longer. These were in maybe 17-18 minutes so I left the second batch in for 21. However, these were still fab. Slightly chewy and husband said they really reminded him of the apple pies from McDonalds.

Sample from the second batch. A bit more brown and a bit more crisp. Equally delicious. You can see that it puffed a bit and is flaky.

I didn’t have powdered sugar here (drat!) so I wasn’t able to make a glaze for the top. Honestly, they don’t need glaze. These things are fantastic. Next time I’m making apple turnovers with a nice apple filling. With cinnamon. And cardamom. Ohhh…

The deep-fried version was also fantastic. It puffed up even more. I could see that version being out of this world with an apple filling. It was *just like* a deep-fried turnover. We ate the two I deep-fried before I could photograph them.

Note to self (and to anyone else making these… let them COOL before eating. I burnt my lip right off on the nuclear filling that came jetting out. Owie zowie!)

All in all, I’d call this little experiment a total success. I look forward to toasting one later to see how it is. That sure would be good with the icing… oh well!