Homemade Berries and Cream Toaster Strudel

Kitchen Little Essentials

For this Berries & Cream Toaster Strudel recipe, you will need:

A large sheet pan

A saucepan

A mixing bowl

My high school self is giving me high fives through the decades today. This HUGE Homemade Berries and Cream Toaster Strudel is absolutely delicious and just so, so much better than anything that you will find in your grocer’s freezer section. Buttery, flaky pastry is filled with a fresh two-berry jam and some soft cream cheese – the balance between the two components tasting just right.

What’s more, when you drench the whole pastry in the luscious lemony icing – it’s a total dead ringer for the toaster strudels we all ate in high school.

{But it’s homemade so obviously better by leaps and bounds.}

How to make this Homemade Berries and Cream Toaster Strudel

I saw that Tieghen Gerard of Half Baked Harvest whipped up a giant homemade Pop Tart like this recently and I was super inspired by that. My husband has a tendency to eat strawberry Pop Tarts on the regular, so I wanted to give it a go. But, in keeping with my mission to make recipes as quick and streamlined as possible, I swapped out the homemade pie dough and opted for some store-bought puff pastry.

So, what you end up with is a dead ringer for a Toaster Strudel, more so than a Pop Tart. But no matter how you shake it, it’s delicious either way. This version is just streamlined as much as possible to make it easy breezy for you guys – it’s efficient and I’ve got a few little tricks going on that make it a true minimalist baker’s dream.

1. For starters, we’re using store-bought puff pastry. So, there’s that. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have the time nor patience to be laminating dough and whipping up scratch puff pastry these days. But if that’s your preference – go for it! That’s cool. But I think Pepperidge Farm does a great job.
2. Secondly, the ingredients in the jam and the icing are almost totally the same, save for the berries and cream components. We’ll combine lemon juice, confectioner’s sugar, and vanilla in each one, and in the jam go the berries and in the icing – just a splash of water.

Jam with confectioner’s sugar? But why?

The inclusion of powdered sugar in a berry jam isn’t traditional, as you typically see granulated sugar, or honey or maple syrup as the sweeteners used. But in the name of minimalism and efficiency, I didn’t want to ask you to reach for two different sugars today, so we’re leaning on the powdered variety twice.

And here’s the real trick – confectioner’s sugar has corn starch in it which, when it bubbles away in the pot with the jam mixture, will actually help to thicken the mixture as it cools. Corn starch has a way of doing that, as we know. We want a nice, thick jam so it stays put in our pastry while it bakes. And the confectioner’s sugar is so perfect for the job.

If you like the looks of this giant homemade toaster strudel, then you might want to check out:

Blueberry and Lemon Skillet Shortcakes

Berry Crumble Picnic Cake

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