Poppin'

For Mother's Day, Andrew had the great idea to make cake pops! We buy them occasionally at Starbucks when he wins gift cards at work (if you don't drink coffee, what else are you going to buy besides cake pops and Italian sodas), and they're delicious and cute and make me happy.

I, of course, found this owl cake pops tutorial and wanted to make them -- but it didn't exactly work out that way. Which was fine. They were still delicious!

So. If you've never made cake pops before and are craft-challenged (like me), here are a few tips.

1. Don't buy dark chocolate just because a recipe suggests it. I LOVE dark chocolate and didn't think twice when the recipe called for it -- but a lot of people don't like dark chocolate and prefer milk chocolate. If you're going to be serving cake pops to kids, think about what they'll eat.

2. Buy a cheap mold or cake pop baller to make things easier (and faster). Andrew rolled all of the cake balls by hand and they looked great -- but they started to come apart before we could dip them in chocolate. I don't know whether a mold would prevent this or not, but it would definitely save your hands!

3. Make sure you have something you can prop your cake pops in to dry. At 11 p.m. on Saturday, I had to make a run to Walmart to buy craft foam we could stick the pops in. DON'T GO to Walmart late at night. It's never a pleasant experience.

4. Read several recipes beforehand if you're not sure how to get the embellishments to stick. As I mentioned, it was late Saturday night when we were making these, and we didn't have the patience to figure out how to get the chocolate chips to stick and not fall off when we dipped them in chocolate. So we just made plain cake balls.

5. Don't expect them to look perfect. I know that sounds really pessimistic, but I've found that when I think things I make will look exactly like the picture, I get down on myself when they don't. It is really hard to get the chocolate to drip off perfectly and not get it on the sticks.

OK. That will be one of my few posts about cooking/baking, but I wanted to share our cake pops attempt! They were red velvet cake pops, too -- my very favorite.