The other week I made heart cut-out cronuts and someone told me that I’m a bit artistic. It made me think – hmm, I guess I am a bit artistic! Since I’ve been in a cooking and baking mood recently (have you seen my bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers?), I wanted to bake some cute treats. I stumbled across this YouTube video showing how to make Totoro toaster pastries and I wanted to give it a try!

For the Totoro-inspired pastry, I decided to make the filling apple! I wanted to make the apple filling from scratch since it’s a lot cheaper to make than buying a can of it. I found this apple filling recipe online and lightly followed it. I’m just too impatient to read the whole entire recipe so I usually make it up half of the time and hope for the best!

Ingredients for Apple Filling

• 2 large apples or 4 regular-sized apples
• ~1 tablespoon of butter
• ~1 teaspoon of cinnamon sugar
• ~¼ cup of sugar
• ~2 tablespoons of water
• ~1 teaspoon of cornstarch

Making the Apple Filling

The first thing you want to do is peel off the apple skin and chop it up in whatever size you’d like! This was the most time-consuming part since peeling off the skin took a while. Once you’ve peeled up the skin, you want to put the butter and cinnamon sugar in a saucepan while on medium heat. Then, slowly add in the apples and sugar. After stirring it for about 5 minutes, you’ll add in the water and cornstarch.

I let this sit on medium heat until it’s soft to my liking!

Ingredients for the Toaster Pastry and Icing

• Premade pie crusts
• 1 egg
• ~1 cup of powdered sugar
• ~1 teaspoon of corn syrup
• Milk
• Red, yellow, green, and blue food coloring

I used a 9-inch pie crust and was able to make 3 toaster pastries from it! Also, I did not have black food coloring – if you have that, great! If not, we can replicate something close to black using those four food colorings.

Assembling the Totoro Toaster Pastry

This part was super easy – all you have to do is spread some apple filling onto one sheet of the pie crust and then cover it with another sheet of pie crust. To make sure the pie crusts are sealed together, take a fork and puncture along the edges for that toaster pastry look! I also coated the top with a thin layer of egg wash and poked holes using a floss pick since I didn’t have any toothpicks, ha.

I then baked it at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes until golden brown. While the pastries are baking, I made my icing! I mixed together powdered sugar, corn syrup, and a splash of milk. Making the icing took me a while since I had to play around with it to get the consistency I liked. Adding the milk will make it runner and adding the powdered sugar will make it stiffer.

To make the black color icing, I mixed equal parts of red, yellow, green, and blue food coloring. It won’t come off as a strong solid black – there’s a slight green tint to it but it’s pretty close considering we don’t have black food coloring. Additionally, to make the light grey icing, I took some of the black icing and mixed them with the regular uncolored icing.

Drawing on Totoro’s Face

Once you have your three colors (white, grey, and black) and the toaster pastries have cooled down a bit, we begin our Totoro drawing! There are two ways to make the Totoro drawings, you can add in the grey part of Totoro or leave it without icing. I decided to make one with the grey icing and two without any icing. Personally, I like how the face without the icing turned out.

You want to be careful and make sure the icing is hardened before adding the details, like the arrows on Totoro’s belly. This part was so therapeutic and so much fun to do!

These Totoro toaster pastries were cute to bake, and I can’t wait to make more for my family and friends to enjoy! What should I make next?