A Philly bakery delivers on an April Fools’ joke with Pickle Pop Tarts

Crust Vegan Bakery cake decorators Jordan Fuchs and Madailein Harrigan and head decorator/team supervisor Sara McCullough spend hours together every week frosting picture-perfect cakes, cookies, and sweets inside Sprinkle City, their corner of the Crust production kitchen on Krams Avenue in Manayunk.

But there’s a joke they decided to loop a larger audience into last month: pickle hand pies, something Fuchs and Harrigan, two pickle aficionados, dreamed up for April Fools’ Day.

McCullough, who hates pickles, knew this was trouble. “I warned them that people would see this and go, ‘I want to buy this,’ and I said, ‘I’m not dealing with that.’ And look what happened,” she giggled.

The elaborate prank Fuchs and Harrigan staged for Instagram — actually baking off six relish-stuffed hand pies and decorating them with ranch-seasoned royal icing and pulverized pickle-flavored potato chips — went over exactly as McCullough predicted.

“We got so many DMs and messages from people that were just like, ‘What are you talking about April Fools’ joke,’ ‘This just broke my heart,’ ‘I would stop at nothing to eat this,’” McCullough said.

So great was the enthusiasm, and so surprisingly tasty were the prototypes, that Crust owners Meagan Benz and Juli Van Brown signed off on giving the people what they wanted. (”With the icing, it kind of becomes a bread and butter pickle,” Fuchs said, describing the bakery crew’s initial impressions of the pickle hand pies’ flavor.)

And so, on a recent weekday morning, Fuchs and Harrigan were assembling 14 dozen pickle hand pies.

Their vegan pie dough was ready to go, rolled out to 5 millimeters and cut into neat rectangles. For this round’s relish filling, they worked with Manayunk’s Penny Pickles, whose owner, Chrissy Emge, had offered to help deliver on the April Fools’ joke. Fuchs and Harrigan landed on a combo of sour and dill pickles — an upgrade to the store-bought relish they used for their joke hand pies. Fuchs scooped 2 tablespoons’ worth onto the center of each tart base, then carefully flattened the mound.

“The dough really does take the shape of whatever is inside,” Harrigan explained. “Especially on a filling like this that isn’t going to melt and get smooth, it’s important to make sure everything is perfect before you cap it.” Fuchs brushed the dough with pickle brine, topped each with another rectangle, then crimped them shut with a fork. Three vents allow room for steam to escape as the hand pies crisp up in the oven.

Harrigan frosted a batch that was already cooled, outlining the center of each pastry with ranch royal icing before smoothing it out with an offset spatula. (Fried pickles were a major point of inspiration, thus the ranch seasoning.) Each hand pie took a dip in crushed pickle potato chips before being sprinkled with dried dill and getting an extra drizzle of icing, for looks.

» READ MORE: Pop-tarts have gone handmade at Philly bakeries

A bite of the hand pie goes over as promised. It’s buttery, tangy, and faintly sweet, with a salty finish from the chip topping. Fuchs and Harrigan agreed: They were even better the second time around.

This decorating trio cranks out an average of 24 dozen hand pies every Tuesday, making spot-on replicas of Kellogg’s classics like wild berry and brown sugar, as well as sweet and savory originals like thick mint, pizza, and blueberry maple. They have made several dozen flavors in the years Crust has been making pop-tarts, but the pickle variety ranks as one of the most complex.

“Usually for pop tarts, some of the stuff that has a more labor-intensive filling, we’ll do much simpler decorations to balance out [the time],” McCullough said. That’s part of why pickle hand pies are likely to be a onetime offering. And according to Emge, the region’s pickle fanatics are all over it, coming from as far as Lancaster and Princeton to pick up preorders.

Nine dozen pickle hand pies are spoken for, but the rest will be up for grabs at Crust’s Main Street shop starting at 8 a.m. Saturday. “We’re gonna bring some over to the storefront to surprise people with this weekend, whether or not they want to be surprised,” McCullough said, adding that she’s really not as sour on the concept as she lets on.

“I may not be a fan of the actual pickle pop tart situation, but I love when people are having fun.”

Crust Vegan Bakery, 4409 Main St., 215-701-4230, crustveganbakery.com