a day late and a dollar short-the summary of my life lately.  no matter how hard i try, i am perpetually scrambling to meet a deadline and not always successfully.  it is spring and that means i have work to do in the garden; at home we have a vegetable garden, an herb garden and many other separate beds of flowers, plants, shrubs and trees.  then there is the demo garden where i do my volunteer hours for the master gardeners-too much to type, just look at it here.  did i mention the bees?  we have one colony and they need our attention on occasion.  then there is the house, the girls-they both graduate this year, the herd (too many cats and a dog) and did i mention my full time job?  at a busy restaurant? which makes coming home and baking seem like too much some days?  oh and there was that big birthday for my husband last week-he’s 39 again…

is it any wonder that i decided to make pop tarts for last week’s pie?  comfort food, a return to carefree childhood days and nothing more important than the lunch menu in the middle school cafeteria or maybe this week’s spelling test on my mind.  i tell both of my girls regularly that they will long for the days of high school-no worries more importantly, no bills, just school.  they don’t believe me now, but we all know that someday, they will and i doubt they will ever tell me so.

i experimented with two different doughs and settled on the second one.  it is more like a tart dough and has sugar, egg and buttermilk in it.  in the end, it was easy to work with-even the scraps.  it held the jam without bursting and after almost a week, the toastrie dough was still tasty with a nice texture.  they never had the cardboard snap of the commercially produced tarts and remained a little on the softer side but even so, everyone who ate one, reached for a second.

one thing to keep in mind, you can use any flavor filling you like.  i happen to like blueberry and made a quick batch of jam with just a one pound bag of frozen blueberries from the grocery store.  you could use raspberry, blackberry, rhubarb or pineapple-all of those are available frozen which makes them a little more affordable than fresh fruit.  if you have a surplus of apples or pears-try those.  and while i did not experiment with things like nutella or lemon curd, i am pretty sure that either one would be pretty tasty.

i didn’t need any special equipment either.  armed with a set of square cutters that range in size from 1 3/8″ to 2 5/8″, i chose the largest cutter but you could do this just as easily with a ruler and a pizza cutter.   to make the fluted edges and to prick the tarts (to allow the steam to escape during baking) i reached into the silverware drawer and used a regular fork.

lined up on a tray, they baked up quickly.  this was a quick treat to make and one of those things i hope to add to my list of things to make at home myself from now on.  just as soon as we move to a 36 hour day and my new clone arrives.  i really need to simplify my life-eliminate and reorganize the excess-now, to find the time to do that…