Strike Gold with These Easy St. Patrick’s Day Pop Tarts
Everyone in your household will be feeling lucky vibes with our St. Patrick’s Day pop tarts! Made with a strawberry filling and store-bought pie crusts, these St. Patrick’s Day breakfast treats are so much more simple to make than you might think!
Versatile Recipe for Pop Tarts
What we love about this homemade pop tarts recipe is that it can be crafted for whatever holiday or seasonal theme you are going for. You can do pink frosting and heart sprinkles for Valentine’s Day. Or use yellow frosting and pastel sprinkles for Easter.
Today, we are showcasing this recipe for St. Patrick’s Day, but it has potential for all year fun!
Easy Dough for St. Patrick’s Day Pop Tarts
Dough for pop tarts is as easy as buying a package of Pillsbury pie dough. We use the refrigerated box with two roll-out pie crusts. Be sure to follow the directions of allowing the pie crusts to come to room temperature for about 15 minutes. If you attempt to work with the dough while it is still cold, it might be too brittle and flake up.
We use the bottom of a box grater to ensure all the cut outs are the same size. We get eight rectangles from one pie crust when we use the box cutter. You might also cut your rectangles using a 3×5 inch index card as a guide. We don’t recommend going any smaller. But it you go much larger, you won’t get very many pop tarts from one pie crust.
If additional rectangles are needed, you might try rolling up the scraps and seeing if you can roll out any other thin pieces using a rolling pin. Or just use a second pie crust.
Place the rectangle pieces of dough on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Adding Fruit Filling for These St. Patrick’s Day Pop Tarts
We chose strawberry preserves for our St. Patrick’s Day pop tarts. But you could easily change out to other fruit preserve flavors as you wish. In our house, strawberry is a common choice for everyone. While the parentals like other flavors like apricot or fig, my sister and I like to keep things more simple. We’ve made our own homemade strawberry pie fillings many times, but we’ve yet to try to make our own homemade strawberry preserves. Maybe one day soon, we will venture into that!
The trick is too not overfill. We only add 1 up to 1 1/2 tablespoons of preserves for each pop tart. We add the preserves to half the rectangles, leaving the other half bare. The bare pieces will be the covering pieces we place on top.
Assembling St. Patrick’s Day Pop Tarts
We beat one egg in a glass to create an egg wash. Once our pop tarts are ready to be assembled, we place a bare piece of dough on top of a filled piece of dough – like making a sandwich. Then, we pinch the edges around with our fingers. After the two pieces are pretty well connected, we take a fork and crimp the edges all the way around.
Next, we poke a few holes in the top of each pop tart using the fork. These are the steam holes that will allow the steam to escape and keep our pop tarts from splitting open.
Finally, we brush the entire tops and edges of each pop tart with the egg wash.
Baking Homemade Pop Tarts
We place the baking pan in the oven at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes. We like them golden brown, but you have to make sure the delicate edges don’t burn.
Frosting Homemade Pop tarts with Canned Frosting
Now, we’ve taken easy street on this recipe and are using canned vanilla frosting. The canned frosting works well when we are in a hurry or when we are going to eat all the pop tarts with non leftover. However, when we aren’t in a rush, we 100% recommend using our mom’s homemade powdered sugar glaze. You can find her glaze recipe with her blueberry mini pies on our other website. That glaze is legit! Plus, it hardens quickly so you can stack the pop tarts on top of each other or store them more easily.
But for today, we are showing you how to frost these St. Patrick’s Day pop tarts with canned frosting. It makes things so much easier and faster!
You simply wait until the pop tarts have cooled down and then spread them with a spoonful of vanilla frosting. If the pop tarts are still hot, the frosting will run when you spread it on.
We don’t recommend overdoing it with the frosting. We prefer a thin layer of frosting. The pop tarts will become really messy if you add a thick layer of frosting. Plus, the canned frostings are sometimes super sweet and overpower some of the other flavors.
On top of the frosting, we add fun St. Patrick’s Day sprinkles. There are different varieties of sprinkles. You might prefer do use only green ones. We like these sprinkles with a mix of green and gold.
Although it’s not necessary, a fun rainbow striped gummy candy or ribbon candy helps give these St. Patrick’s Day breakfast treats a full themed look!
Easy St. Patrick’s Day Pop Tarts for Breakfast
Ingredients
- 1 Pie crust rolled (from a box of 2)
- 3 oz Strawberry preserves
- 1 Egg
- 8 oz Vanilla frosting canned or homemade glaze
- Sprinkles
- Rainbow candy Optional: for decoration
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400°F.
- Cut out 8 rectangles from the pie crust dough. You can use the bottom of a cheese grater or a 3×5 index card as a guide. If additional rectangles are needed, take theremaining crust, knead it together, and roll it out into another large, thin piece (just under1/4 inch thick) to cut additional shapes.
- Beat the egg in a small bowl to make the egg wash.
- Lay out 8 rectangles on the parchment-lined baking sheet. Add 1 tablespoon of strawberry preserves on 4 of the rectangles.
- Brush the edges of each rectangle with the egg wash, then place another rectangle on top of the jam.
- Gently pinch the edges together to seal, then crimp the edges with a fork.
- Poke holes in the top of each pop tart, then brush the entire top, including the edges, with the egg wash.
- Bake for about 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.
- Once cooled, spread premade icing over each pop tart.
- Add St. Patrick's Day sprinkles and rainbow candies for a festive touch!
Nutrition
More Holiday Day Fun
Try some of our other fun holiday recipes!
