Valentine's Day Cake Pops and Strawberries

I'm not Valentine's Day's biggest fan, but I do have to say I love the goodies that come along with it! It's just about the only time of year I like the color pink, too. I'm not very girly at all - I don't think I even own a pink shirt - but when this time of year comes around, who can resist making everything in pretty shades of pink and red?

Maybe it's just the mass amounts of chocolate consumed that make me feel this way, but enough rambling. Let's get this post started. This is one of two Valentine's Day posts I'm going to be posting. This half of the festivity was made for a Valentine's Day party at my father's work. He requested cake pops and chocolate-covered strawberries.

Both of these pictures were taken from a phone, so sorry if they're not top notch. As you can see, half of the cake pops were white and half were pink. Instead of using melted white chocolate this time, I gave vanilla-flavored almond bark a try. I much preferred it to chocolate. The taste is equally delicious and it's thinner (thus, not as heavy), so it was easier to apply. To decorate I used edible pearls and alternate-colored drizzles.

I used a cake mix to make these, so sue me. You may notice that when it comes to things I intend to spend a significant amount of time on decorating, I opt for mixes. Maybe that's lazy, but I'm sorry if I don't want to spend hours upon hours standing in my kitchen while my one-year-old roams the house screaming. I'm 37 weeks pregnant, also - so cut me some slack.

And here are my berries. Again, I used melted almond bark and melted milk chocolate to dip these, with alternate-colored drizzles. I think the white ones with the pink drizzles look pretty cool.

Everyone loved them, my dad said. Who doesn't love fruit dipped in chocolate and bits of cake on a stick?

Yes, so speaking of me being pregnant - about that. Like I said, I'm 37 weeks along so any time now my little girl will be making her arrival into this world. I'll keep baking and blogging until she gets here, but once she's here, it may be a short while before I can establish a new routine and get back in the groove enough to start blogging again! I'm not talking months and months, just a few weeks maybe. I'm giving you fair warning so you don't get tired of waiting and give up on me.

Anyway, so keep an eye out for Valentine's Day post number two, which I'll have up sometime within the next two days. Until next time!

Cake Pops - Birthday

Last time I made cake pops, it was such a fiasco that I pushed all thoughts of cake pops from my mind. Every time I saw pictures of them, no matter how adorable, I resisted the urge to make them myself. However, my brother's birthday is today, and a while ago he informed me that cake pops were what he wanted me to make. I started to refuse, but then figured it had been a while and I've learned a few things since then, so may as well give it another try.

As with last time, I used a boxed cake mix to make my pops. The cake mix called for a cup of water, but my cake pop pan instructions said that for best results, I should substitute milk for water and cut the amount in half. So instead of one cup of water, I used one half-cup of milk. This made my batter thicker and I suspect that's where my problem came from.

Despite coating the pan generously with cooking spray, most of my cake balls broke in half as I opened the pan. I managed to salvage the equivalent of fifteen cake pops.

In order to be able to use the halves, I put melted white chocolate in between them, like a sandwich. There were a few that hadn't broken so I just put them on the sticks, using the melted chocolate as a glue. Then I let them all sit in the refrigerator for a while to set before I decorated them.

That is a Wilton cake pop decorating stand - much better than what I used last time, which was a styrofoam block that tipped over because my pops were too heavy.

This photo is just a close-up so you can see how I glued my cake pop halves together with chocolate.

After they set in the fridge, I started to decorate. I used green and blue food coloring and sprinkles. The finished product, though simple, looked very nice.

Some of the pops that had been glued together with chocolate were too heavy, so they began to come off their sticks when dipped in chocolate. To remedy this, I enlisted the help of my step-daughter. I held the pop together between its stick and a toothpick while she added the sprinkles.

This batch of cake pops, while simpler in design than my last batch, I found to be much more visually appealing - and a lot more fun to make. I think this is because last time I made them I had no idea what I was getting into. The internet made cake pops look so easy and adorable - I didn't know much about what I was doing, what supplies were needed, etc. There are a hundred different problems you can run into making cake pops, and though I've barely scratched the surface of the art of cake-pop making, I feel a lot more prepared. I know now that cake pops aren't as easy as they look and, what's more, I've learned to not let myself lose track of the fun that baking is supposed to be by comparing what I make with the masterpieces produced by others. There will ALWAYS be someone better than me, and that's ok! As long as I love what I'm doing, I will keep doing it.

DC Cake Pops

So today's post is the saga of my DC cake pops. DC, in case you aren't aware, is the comics company that does Batman. I used Betty Crocker's Extra Moist White cake mix. So, like a few of my other posts, this is more about decoration. I coated them with white chocolate mixed with food coloring and decorated them with Betty Crocker's Decorating Cookie Icing.

Cooling, while stuck into styrofoam blocks.

I only have 18 cake pop sticks, and I ended up making about 30. My husband and I improvised and came up with a solution for the other 12 - we'd put them on straws. BAD idea. The cake pops were much too heavy for the straws but I had no other option. We reinforced them by folding straw pieces in half and putting them inside the straws, and that helped - but they were still very top-heavy.

The next problem I encountered was the cake balls were too heavy to be dipped into the white chocolate. They came off the ends of the sticks, even though I had "glued" them together with melted chocolate and let them cool. So I ended up having to "paint" each cake pop, resulting in a totally NOT smooth surface, as I had envisioned.

Again, this is white chocolate, even though it looks like icing. Ugh.

I suppose I am something of a perfectionist, not because everything I do is perfect - definitely not that - but because when I imagine something, and then it turns out differently, I become very agitated. When the chocolate coating on my cake pops did not turn out smooth, I just about gave up on the whole thing. Childish, yes.

But I did end up finishing what I'd started. I used toothpicks to apply the icing and in the end, things turned out alright.

Starting in upper left and going clockwise:  Flash, Superman, Green Lantern, Batman.

Batman was my favorite, and Green Lantern turned out horribly, but I was so frustrated by the end of this project that I didn't even care enough to fix it.

Overall, I'm happy with them. This was my first attempt at cake pops and I ran into several obstacles, but next time, I'll know how to handle them. Although, it'll probably be quite a while before I try these again - the process was quite frustrating and kind of burnt me out on them.