Homemade strawberry poptarts

I have delusions of grandeur. Sometimes I think I’ll travel the world with no money, suddenly become a ballerina at age 25 or save every neglected animal in the world. Most of the time, though, I’m just in the kitchen.

Today, oh today… Today I thought I would make homemade poptarts. No big deal, I thought. People do this all the time. The problem, of course, is that when people like me do this, they do it without paying the least bit of attention to a recipe. OK, a little bit of attention…

I started off with the pie crust from my first ever pie. All the other recipes I saw called for pastry crust (homemade or store bought) but anyone who’s ever eaten a real Poptart knows damn well they are not delicate flaky pastries. Having eaten many a maple brown sugar Poptart in my day, I know that they are, in fact, rather dense and cardboard-y. So I knew that the dense, shortbread-like texture of that pie crust would be a better fit.

Vegan strawberry poptarts

Correction: It would have been a better fit had I made it correctly. Instead, I used too much coconut, not enough oil and the completely wrong flour. As it turns out, a tub labeled AP flour in my cabinet is actually filled with what appears to be chickpea flour. Live and learn.

After rolling out the already not so perfect crust, I realized I was only going to get three poptarts out of this bad boy. I almost, almost gave up but kind of wanted to see how far these three little guys could go. Consider them my children and I was trying to see them through all the way to college. Right? Whatever.

So I kept going. I started haphazardly assembling a strawberry “jam” by completely making up the process. I threw several cups of strawberries, some sugar and a little balsamic vinegar into a pot and cooked away until it reduced. I added 1tsp agar agar to thicken it up and that was that. It actually worked.

These poptarts were supposed to be my contribution to the next meeting of the Charlotte Food Bloggers on Sunday, but I was still doubting things when it came time for assembly and baking so I made a batch of raw brownies topped with strawberry jam as a backup.

Ye Me of little faith was a bit surprised to find that those three unassuming pathetic poptarts came out perfectly.

You made it, little guy

I topped them with a strawberry glaze made with powdered sugar, coconut milk and a little strawberry jam and promptly packed them up to send along with Stew to his End of the World party.

I’m sorry, Charlotte Food Bloggers, there will be no poptarts at the meeting. But I’ll have brownies as an olive branch. The poptarts are excellent but I fear three two and a half would not suffice and, let’s face it, I’m not doing it again.