I had mixed feelings about this past Baked Sunday Mornings' assignment. Matt and Renato's chocolate pop tarts aren't just chocolate pop tarts, they are also stuffed with peanut butter and (strawberry) jam. Or in my rendition, they are chocolate pop tarts with almond butter and jam filling. As a dessert, they consist of nothing that I would ever think to eat together.
First, it's been a long time since I've eaten a pop tart. I used to kind of like the low-fat brown sugar Poptarts as well as the low-fat iced strawberry Poptarts, but that was ages ago in college, when Poptarts seemed like a better choice than the cafeteria food. But even in college, I didn't like the chocolate-flavored Poptarts....
Second, I loathe peanut butter and jam anything. It's never been a combination I've liked. The only flavor worse than strawberry jam (with peanut butter) is grape jelly, so Matt and Renato's combination was a plus, but I wasn't feeling particularly enthusiastic. Then there was the question of how peanut butter, strawberry jam, chocolate dough, and chocolate icing could all work well together....
So, when I saw the line in the recipe header suggesting almond butter and blueberry jam as an alternative to the peanut butter and strawberry jam, I quickly decided I was going to try that variation. I bought my Trader Joe's smooth almond butter and some low-sugar blueberry jam that cost a fortune, and got started.
After that introduction, I guess it's not surprising that I struggled with this recipe. The dough was a hassle to work with, and I felt like the amount of time it took me to cut the butter in led to a warmer dough than if I had just started it in a food processor. I tried my best, but faced with the strong admonition from Matt and Renato not to overwork the dough, I wound up with chunks of visible butter throughout my chocolate pop tart dough. Evidently I was so perturbed by this that I didn't take any pictures.
Once the butter-streaked dough ball was resting in the refrigerator, I made the chocolate ganache. This may be a simple function of how almond butter is, but I had a difficult time with this step. Because the almond butter was a bit separated (as they naturally are), the heated cream essentially loosened the almond butter but couldn't fully melt the chocolate. I had to fish out chunks of unmelted chocolate and slowly melt them by themselves. After that painful process, my ganache looked a bit grainy and seemed to separate a little. I trudged onward though, unwilling to waste all the chocolate I'd used for the ganache.
Next up was rolling out the chocolate pop tart dough. This was probably the worst phase of the pop tart making for me. We're warned not to overflour the dough, but my dough was super duper sticky (and streaked with butter), tearing easily and going from too cold to roll to overly warm in the space of 30 seconds. I found it challenging to roll the dough out evenly into a reasonably sized square. Once rolled out thinly, I managed to wrestle 18 squares of pop tart dough out of the mess I'd made of the counter (rather than the 20 we were supposed to have).
This took me multiple roll-cut-roll-cut-freeze-repeat cycles and my rectangles were pretty non-uniform. I gave serious consideration to scraping the entire batch of dough into the garbage, but figured I'd gotten this far, I might as well see what happened. Still no pictures, because it looked like such a failure, I guess. Or because my hands were covered in flour and sticky dough.
My chocolate pop tarts with almond butter and jam filling saga didn't conclude with rolling out the dough. The final hurdle (for me) was filling the dough with the chocolate-almond butter ganache followed by the blueberry jam. I found the instructions for filling in the shape of a "Z" to be tremendously unclear. 
I kept rereading the page wondering what I was missing. I had way too much filling for the number of pop tart halves I'd made and ultimately realized that I needed to be filling the dough squares in the form of two sideways "Z"s that followed next to each other, or one sideways "Z" and one upright "Z" in order to maximize the amount of filling that could be squeezed into each square. 
Once I placed the top part of the dough onto each filled rectangle, I realized that I should have filled my pop tarts even less than I had, because there was no way I could close and crimp them without tearing the dough. Even with my overflow problems, I still had ½ to ¾ of the chocolate filling leftover and ½ the jam as well.
I chilled these overnight before baking them, then baked them straight from the freezer for 15 minutes. To my shock and delight, although the filling did leak out a little, none of the pop tarts exploded. I let the baked pop tarts cool for about 3 hours and opted not to frost them because I was worried they would be too sweet. I didn't think they were very good right after coming out of the oven, but once they were fully cooled, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they'd somehow turned out well. They were quite soft and dense, but not fall-apart delicate, and the flavors were well-balanced. They weren't flaky or crispy at the edges like I expect pop tarts to be, but if you're looking for a soft cookie filled with a chocolate-almond-blueberry jam, these will do brilliantly. My co-workers ate them quite happily and I don't think anyone would mind having a repeat batch made, although I think I'd handle the dough a little differently next time (food processor testing seems merited) and not stress about the precise number of rectangles I got from the dough.
If I haven't talked you out of making these chocolate pop tarts with almond butter and jam filling yourself (they're good, just not as accessible as many other Baked recipes), head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe. Don't just read my opinion of these either. Read what the other bakers thought here.
