Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make homemade chocolate Pop-Tarts.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well-researched,
and perfected recipe. In my last video,
I shared how to make classic strawberry Pop-Tarts.
Today, we are doing all chocolate.
Let's go ahead, grab your food processor, and get started.
Now I love using my food processor because it makes short work of making this chocolate pastry.
We are going to start by combining 2 and 1/4 cups of all-purpose
flour, 1/4 cup of natural cocoa powder,
1/4 cup of granulated sugar, and a half teaspoon of table salt
right in the basin of our food processor.
Now, we're just going to pop that lid on, and we're going to pulse very briefly,
just until everything is combined. Alright,
next you are going to need one cup of very cold,
unsalted butter. Now, I have cubed mine.
You're going to want to cut yours into small pieces as well.
And I like to pop this butter—after I cut it,
I'll pop it in the freezer for about 10 to 15 minutes just to make sure it's nice and cold.
Now, you'll want to scatter this evenly over your flour and cocoa powder
mixture. We’ll pop that lid back on
and we are going to pulse repeatedly until the butter is cut into the mixture.
Now I want you to see what that looks like, so, if you take a look here,
you can still see discernible pieces of butter remaining.
They're not super large, but they're still there.
This is perfect. I'm not going to go any further with this.
Now the next thing you're going to need is 1/2 cup of sour cream.
And we'll just drop this over the top as well.
Once again, we're just going to pulse everything together
and I just want to do this just until the dough starts to cling together.
All right, I don't want to go any further than this,
so we're going to go ahead and take this off of our food processor.
Always make sure you remove that blade. You don't want to cut yourself
and I am just going to form this dough into a rectangle,
basically. Now, you could do this on a clean lightly floured surface.
I like to do this straight on a piece of plastic wrap.
So I'm just going to pour it out and just use my hands to form it into a cohesive rectangle.
You don't want to see any cracks
remaining. You may see some pieces of butter remaining and poking through,
that's totally fine.
Now we'll get this very tightly wrapped up and I do like the flatten it a little bit,
it's going to make it easier to roll out when we're ready for that.
And we're going to pop this in the fridge where it's going to need to chill
for about 45 minutes to an hour.
So while our chocolate pastry is chilling,
what I like to do is begin preparing the chocolate filling. Now in a heatproof dish,
we're going to combine 6 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate,
I'm just using chocolate chips, with two tablespoons of salted butter.
And I'm just going to use a knife to cut this into small pieces
because we're going to be melting everything and I want it to melt nice and evenly.
We're also going to add 2 tablespoons of heavy cream.
Now we're going to pop this in the microwave and heat it in about 20-25
second increments, stirring well in between,
until the chocolate is completely
melted and the butter is completely melted and this mixture is nice and smooth.
All right, this looks perfect,
so the next thing we're going to need is three tablespoons of powdered sugar
and just a half teaspoon of vanilla extract.
Just whisk everything together until the mixture is nice and smooth.
You shouldn't have any lumps from the sugar. And this is pretty liquidy at this point,
so what we're going to do is we're going to set it aside and it's going to firm up quite a bit.
It's going to kind of become like a ganache truffle filling almost. We're going to let it sit
and let it solidify a bit while our pastry dough finished cooling—chilling.
So once your dough has finished chilling, or when you're getting close to it being done chilling,
you're going to want to get your oven preheated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
That can take some time, so let's grab our pastry dough
and we're just going to transfer this to a clean lightly floured surface.
All right, now we're just going to roll this dough out
until we have it between 1/8 and 1/4 inch thick.
And note that while I'm rolling this out, I'm pausing periodically
and using a spatula to scrape under the dough because I don't want it sticking to the counter.
I want it to be easy to get my rectangles out of the dough when I go to cut them,
so feel free to pry up the dough, sprinkle flour underneath
as needed and use as much flour as you need.
Okay, this looks pretty good, so now we're going to cut out our rectangles for our Pop-Tarts.
I found this cute little cookie cutter. I will see if I can link to
it in my equipment section of the recipe.
But if not, if you can't find one of these, you can just cut your rectangles by hand.
They should be two and a half inches by 4 inches,
Now we’ll cut out our rectangles, keep them close together.
And I'm just going to do about half of these for now,
but, obviously, with any scraps that you have,
you want to regroup them, re-roll them out, so you get as many Pop-Tarts as possible out of this.
You should be able to get 20 rectangles so that you have 10 Pop-Tarts.
Okay, so I place this cutout dough on a baking sheet that I've lined with parchment paper.
Now half of these are going to be the bottoms of the Pop-Tarts
and the other half are going to be the tops.
Now, one thing I want to do real quickly is I want to make an egg wash
that we're going to be using to brush
this dough. It’s really simple to make. You're just going to need one large egg and
a teaspoon of water. And we’ll whisk it together really,
really well. Now just use a pastry brush to lightly brush
the entire surface of half of your rectangles.
Now, these are the bottom halfs of our Pop-Tarts.
All right, now once we've done that, we can start filling or Pop-Tarts.
So, as you can see here, this is the filling we prepped a little while ago.
It started to resolidify, so we're just going to scoop this and use about a heaping
tablespoon of filling, drop it in the center of each of our bottom Pop-Tart pieces.
I like to use a spoon to kind of squash it a little
bit because I don't want to have super big mounds right in the center.
Alright, now we're going to work with the other half of our Pop Tart dough that we haven't
yet brushed and we're going to just place that over the chocolate filling.
And you'll want to use a fork to just crimp the sides of the dough all the way around
because we're going to be sealing that chocolate filling inside.
Now we're going to grab that egg wash again and just lightly brush the surface of each Pop-Tart.
Now we want these Pop-Tarts to be able to vent while they're baking,
so I like to take a wooden skewer
and I'm just going to poke about six to eight holes in the surface of each Pop-Tart.
Now if you're working in a really hot kitchen
and your dough is starting to get sticky and difficult to work with, at this point
you—or at any point—if you're worried you're having trouble,
you're going to want to pop your tray back in the fridge,
for 5 to 10 minutes or until it's manageable. I'm not having any issue with the dough today.
It's not too hot in here, so I am ready to pop these right in my 400
°F preheated oven. They're going to need to bake for about 15 to 17 minutes. After baking,
we're going to want to let these cool completely before we cover them with icing.
But let's go ahead and make that icing while we wait.
So here I have one and a half cups of powdered sugar and I'm going to add a tablespoon of natural
cocoa powder. I have two tablespoons of milk measured out here,
but I'm only going to add about half of it
for now. And I also like to add one tablespoon of light corn syrup,
which helps make this frosting dry nice and hard
and shiny. Now
we'll whisk these together until the mixture is nice and smooth,
adding more milk as needed. I do need a little bit more because this is a little too stiff.
All right, and you know you have the right icing consistency,
when you lift the whisk or your spoon out of the frosting
and the little ribbon that forms as it drizzles back into the bowl,
it should hold its shape for a couple of seconds before completely dissolving back into the icing.
All right, once your Pop-Tarts have cooled, all that's left to do is decorate them with our glaze.
Now, I have these on a cooling rack,
but I like to put a piece of wax paper underneath to catch any drips that might happen.
Now, let's just drizzle this over our Pop-Tarts. And then for a final finishing touch,
I love to add sprinkles. I mean,
what is a Pop-Tart without sprinkles? All right,
once the glaze has set, you are ready to dig in to your very own homemade chocolate Pop-Tarts.
I really hope you guys enjoy today's a recipe.
I had a lot of fun making this one. I think you're going to love it
too. If you try this out, please let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time.
Look at that filling.