Home-Made Pop Tarts

I have a friend, Muffin, who's youngest (age 9) was diagnosed with autism at the age of 3.  He has been on a gluten-free, casein-free diet since shortly after being diagnosed.  One of the foods that she has not been able to find a substitute for is Pop-Tarts.  According to a lot of the people on the message boards she frequents, they haven't found one either.

Since I love a challenge, lol, I decided to see if I could come up with something that might work.  I started my search online, and was led to this website.  Now, the major problem that I could see with making pop-tarts gluten free is the pie dough.  After much research, I found out that gluten-free pie dough does not generally act like regular pie dough.  The gluten in regular pie dough is what gives it it's elasticity and ability to be picked up and placed in a pie plate, etc...  There are many combinations of all the gluten-free flours that can be mixed in as many different combo's as there are people.  Since I am not made of money, lol, I wasn't about to start experimenting with all the gluten free flours available.

In my travels online, I ran across Gluten Free Bisquick!  Hmm....now this gave me some ideas.  I read the ingredient list, and it seemed to be basically gluten-free flours with leavening added to them.  So, I decided to do a little test with the original recipe I found for homemade pop-tarts.  The recipe is flour, butter, shortening and water.  I made it without the butter, since my friend's son can't have regular butter, and his butter substitute does not behave like normal butter.

So, I mixed together flour, shortening and water until it formed a ball.  I only made a small amount, since it was only a test of the recipe.











The recipe called to cut the dough into rectangles (ala pop tarts), but I used round cutters.

The recipe called for jam to fill the pie dough with.  I used Polaner All-Fruit because that's what I had.

So, I put about a half tsp between two small circles of dough, crimped the edges together with a fork, and popped it into a pie plate and then into the oven.  I baked it at 425 for about 6 minutes.  The recipe said it should brown, which it didn't, so I think next time it needs to bake a little longer.  Here's what I ended up with:

I am heading over to my friend's house on Sunday for dinner and to exchange gifts.  We are going to attempt to make pop-tarts with Gluten Free Bisquick, soy-free shortening (yeah, he's allergic to soy too), water, and jam.

The icing for the pop-tarts will be confectioner's sugar and his milk.  It won't be able to be put on until after the pop-tarts come out of the toaster.  That's something else we have to test....whether these can be reheated in the toaster like regular pop-tarts.

I'll be sure to report on our fun!