Raspberry "Pop-Tarts" and Some Other Christmas-Morning Breakfast Treats

By West Village Bill

I enjoy making breakfast treats for my family to eat on Christmas morning. Sometimes I make them ahead of time, and sometimes I'll bake them at my Granny's house. This year, I'm making a riff on Pop-Tarts that I found in Bon Appétit magazine back in April. I started the process on Sunday here in the city up to the point of freezing the filled tarts, and I'll take them frozen to South Jersey to bake on Saturday.

For the filling, I used raspberry jam I made when I visited my blogger buddies Mark and Rodger out in Portland, Oregon, over the summer. I doubled the recipe for the tart dough, and I used the kitchen scale Dad and Jean got me for my birthday to make sure the four portions I needed to separate the dough into were equal: Each weighed about 9 1/2 ounces. I shaped the four wads of dough into discs and chilled them in the refrigerator. The very buttery dough had come together pretty easily.

I goofed up when I made the first bunch of tarts. For some reason, I was thinking I needed to make only two tarts instead of four from the first disc of dough, so those turned out extra large. I made out much better with the remaining three discs and so got 12 tarts with the desired 3-by-5-inch dimensions. I froze all of the tarts in plastic containers with parchment paper separating the stacks.

Yesterday morning, I heated up one of the extra large tarts for my breakfast. I really dug it. The crust was nice and flaky, and the jam tasted wonderful in combination with its buttery shell. It was much better than an actual Pop-Tart, which my Aunt Marian always likened to two pieces of cardboard with jelly in the middle.

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Perhaps my most popular breakfast treats with my family—and certainly with my Dad—were the Chocolate-Orange Sweet Rolls With Orange Glaze my nephews helped me make at Granny's House back in 2006. The recipe still isn't up on Epicurious. Maybe that's because it appeared in the R.S.V.P. section of Bon Appétit in which readers request the recipes for dishes they've enjoyed at a restaurant or, in this case, a B&B: The Acworth Inn on Cape Cod. If you want the recipe, you can Google it, and you'll find it on a site that credits a blogger who says she got it from a friend. Who got it from BA but didn't say that she did. :-)


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The other day, I was looking in Williams-Sonoma for a spice grinder, which my sweetie, Tony P., had requested for Christmas, when I saw this King Arthur Flour mix for making "Classic Monkey Bread":

Monkey Bread was the very first breakfast treat I made for my family, back in 2002, when my nephews were only 4, from a recipe I saw in the holiday edition of Martha Stewart Kids magazine. Last year, I made Banana Bread, which is the kind of bread that Monkey Bread would eat if it could. Ha!

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On Saturday, I got an Apple and Pumpkin Turnover from Windfall Farms at the Union Square Greenmarket that I ate for a pre-Christmas breakfast on Sunday. At $5, it was kinda spendy, but I liked that most of the ingredients came from Windfall or other Greenmarket sources. And it was really good.