Homemade Toaster Strudel

A toaster strudel is a ready-made, frozen breakfast pastry sold by Pillsbury that was introduced in the 1980s as a rival to the popular toaster treat, Pop Tarts, made by Kelloggs. While the Pop Tart has a firm crust somewhere between a cookie and pie dough in texture, a toaster strudel has a flaky outer layer, more like puff pastry dough or a croissant dough. It toasts up soft, with a gooey, hot filling, and you are supplied with a little packet of icing to drizzle on top of the pastries. With puff pastry already in my freezer, it seemed like it would be easy to put together a similar version of the packaged product that could be made entirely at home. The puff pastry dough should be rolled out fairly thin before beginning, since the toaster strudels are not thick and you don’t really want them to puff up too much; the pastries should be softer, rather than crunchier. The trick to having these turn out well was in the filling. I used jam, but jam by itself will run out of the pastry and not leave a pocket of filling. To solve the problem, I added some cornstarch to the jam, which thickened it up and helped to hold it in place. Now, if you have a particularly runny jam, you might want to add a little extra cornstarch than the amount I give below, but otherwise you can use any flavor of jam you like. The pastries should be assembled and baked in advance, then frozen so that they can be reheated on-demand, as snacks or breakfast treats. The packaged toaster strudels come with some kind of “sweet cream” glaze, which tastes a bit like cream cheese. This is probably the one instance where storebought has an advantage, as it is a lot of trouble to make a cream cheese frosting for just one single breakfast pastry. I used a simple vanilla glaze for mine, which was delicious. If I were serving a crowd, I might think about making a thin cream cheese frosting, but then again that’s really not what the freezer-to-oven (or toaster oven) pastries are intended for. You’ll notice that my baking instructions are for the oven. The pastries will reheat nicely in a toaster oven, as well. While you should be able to put them into a regular toaster, only do so if you are absolutely sure that your pastries haven’t leaked any filling during their initial baking. If they have, that filling might still ooze out and burn in the toaster. I decided to stick with the oven instructions for the recipe below because it is an option for all of the pastries, even those that have sprung a little leak during the initial baking, and since not everyone has a toaster oven sitting on the kitchen counter. Top with simple glaze before serving recipe on account