I Tried To Be Claire Saffitz for a Day In Quarantine and…
I have been threatening my parents that I would make pop tarts since April 29th. I know the exact date, because it’s the day Bon Appetit posted the recipe for Claire Saffitz’s Gourmet Strawberry Pop Tarts.
If you haven’t heard of Claire Saffitz, you probably live under a rock, have no interest in food, or do not identify as a millennial. Claire has a series on Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel called Gourmet Makes. Every episode, she makes a nostalgic treat, gourmet.
I’ve been feeling all the nostalgia during quarantine, so this recipe couldn’t have come at a better time. Yet, I still felt like I had no time to make them!
Then, like many others, I was laid off from my job (it’s ok!). The silver lining of it all? There’s no better time to take up new projects.
I wanted to make the recipe exactly according to the recipe. If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you know I like to change things up and tweak them so that they work best for me, or because I’m lazy and impatient, but I knew I wanted to stick as close to the recipe as possible for this one.
Day 1 was deceivingly EASY! I made the dough as the instructions said, simmered some frozen strawberries for what seemed like forever, mixed some icing with food coloring to make sprinkles, and then had a lot to clean up.
Day 2 is when I realized I made some mistakes.
The icing for my sprinkles had not hardened enough because I didn’t spread it thin enough on the parchment paper. So when it came time to break the dried icing up and turn it into sprinkles, I had a lot of ugly tie-dye clumps. When I rolled my dough out, it stuck to my counter top, so I balled it back up and stuck it back in the fridge. When I finally was able to roll it out I very sloppily scored the dough. You’ll see in the picture that not one of my pop tarts is the same size as another....
It wouldn’t be a Gourmet Makes without some mistakes, but this process took too long, and I don’t think I could do this again, without shortcuts, to perfect the final product unless I had some help! It would definitely be a fun recipe to do with a friend or family member to split the tasks. Maybe I gave up on perfection too easily, but the final product looks and tastes good enough for me.
Although I lack the Claire Saffitz signature attention to detail, I had a great time making these and think I did pretty well! They came out a little on the pale side, but definitely tasted delicious. The strawberry jam center was SPOT ON. I’ll be making thumbprint cookies with that leftover jam.
Would you try this recipe? Let me know in the comments!
xoxo,
Haley
