Bakerella I'm not. But I tried.

Have you seen the cute cake pops that Bakerella is famous for? If you haven't, you must pause right now and head to her website (http://www.bakerella.com/) and check them out right now.  Once you've done that, you can come back here and see how to have fun TRYING to make them. 

The premise is easy.  Bake a cake, crumb it up, add some frosting, make cake balls on a stick and decorate!  (I learned to make a photo collages just so I could show you all how I made a mess of my kitchen!)  After I baked a  Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix and used my decades old food processor (Christmas 1979 or thereabouts) to turn the cake into crumbs, I added about 2/3 of a container of cream cheese frosting.  One mistake here was probably not waiting until the cake was completely cool.   But proceeding along, I used a little ice cream scoop to make the balls, rolling them around in my clean hands to make them completely round.  I chilled them in the freezer slightly before "sticking" them.  You can see that there must be a better technique to this step.  I found that they stayed better once I put a little of the candy coating on the stick first. Styrofoam did help stabilize them while they waited for their turn to be dunked in the container of orange candy chips that had been melted in the microwave.  I found some food safe markers at Michaels that I thought I could use to draw cute little jack o'lantern faces on each one, but they didn't work.  I resorted to mini chocolate chips and green tic tacs.  After about three hours of this, I only had about four good ones and several ugly ones.  Since little D was coming over for a few hours, I placed the remaining cake mixture in the fridge to tackle the next day.  My cake pops might have been ugly, but they definitely passed his taste test!

Moving on.  The next morning I decided to take the easier route and turned my cake pops into cake truffles.  This I could handle!  I see some possibilities for Christmas cake truffles here.  Maybe red velvet cake mix, white candy coating and any number of holiday sprinkles or decorations.  Bakerella has lots of ideas on her website.   While I was there, I found this recipe for Pumpkin Butter Dessert Bars.  This is more my type of baking!  Our subdivision had a fall festival/potluck supper last evening so I took a plate of the bars and cake balls/truffles to share.  A good excuse to make a mess of my kitchen and try a fun new recipe !

Other than these kitchen adventures, I spent some time in the sewing room this week too.  Now that they've received their package I can show  the three little embroidered shirts for three little spooks.  Do you know how hard it is to find nice plain colored t-shirts for little kids? 

Have a good week !