I win!

YAH I DID IT!!

White Cake, Milk Chocolate, Rolled in Oreo Crumbs



I made Phil a football!



Cake Pops 1 : Jesse 0

Hello Everyone!  I hope you've all been well.  I know it's been a long time since I posted and I'll fill everyone in on what I've been up to later, today's post is about Cake Pops.  Have ya heard of them?  There is a new book out by the amazing Bakerella.

Last night we had dinner at my bestie's and Shelley and I got to talking about the Cake Pops.  You ever have one of those moments of cockiness where you say, "I can totally do that!  Doesn't look that hard.  Yep I'm gonna make those."?  Well that was me last night.  I fell asleep with visions of Cake Pops dancing in my head.  Bakerella has managed to turn these into a new baking sensation, she's on TV (she was on Martha Stewart!) has a book out, tours the country doing book signings...yep I could do this!  Her first batch of Cake Pops were a simple cake ball and I thought that would be a good place for me to start.

Bakerella's Simple Cake Balls



So I got up today, did some puttering around, went on a lunch date with my hubby and headed to Michaels with my littlest one.  I came home pretty stoked.  The cake baked while I was out.  I remembered Shelley and I talking abut making sure the cake was fully cooled before starting, so I stuck it in the freezer for good measure.  And the adventure began:

I cut off the sides of the cake as I remembered her saying it would look better not to have the brown bits mixed in with the crumbs.

I began crumbling the cake, I was thinking it was pretty moist, but how bad could it be?

This is where things started to go down-hill.  I added 3/4 of the can of icing all at once.  Looking back I should have added a bit at a time to see how moist it really was.  I started rolling balls but they are soooo wet!!

Tried some football shapes, having high hopes for my artistic abilities

So now I melt the chocolate.  I've never tried to make anything with the Wilton Mini Melts.  Shelley makes gorgeous chocolates for all kinds of occasions.  I remember her saying it's hard to work with a lot of it at a time because it starts to stiffen up pretty quick.  The instructions tell me to melt the chocolate in the microwave for about 2 minutes on power level 2.  I have a huge piece of junk of a microwave and 7 minutes later I start to get some melt-age.  I was really concerned about over-cooking it or burning it so I tried using it then.  I think it still needed to melt more.  I dropped the balls in the coffee cup I was using, spooned chocolate over the top then tried to scoop them out.  Sometimes the spoon would poke the bottom of the ball making a mark, or crumbs would mix in with the chocolate.  I had melted half the bag of chocolates and had only managed to cover about 6 balls...and they were U.G.L.Y.!!

Crumbs all mixed in with the chocolate

A confirmed Epic Fail

A smart girl knows when to accept defeat

The best looking one of the bunch

Why is there lines in it?  Why didn't it go all smooth?  Bakerella's look like she uses fondant on them they're so smooth.  I'm guessing cuz the chocolate wasn't melted enough.



Tasted pretty sick.  Like very undercooked cake dipped in way too much chocolate.







Catchin' Up.

Hello everyone!  Well the holidays have come and gone and now we slog through the cold days of January.  I hope everyone's holidays were as wonderful as ours. 

The weekend before Christmas we bravely took stand-by flights to Abbotsford, luckily there was lots of room and no storms so we made it there fine.  It's been quite a few years since having Christmas at my mom's and I was quite excited for it.  On the Sunday we went to my sister's church where we listened to my hilarious nephew, Elijah, and all his little buddies sing Christmas songs.  As soon as the performance was done Phil and my Brother-In-Law, Dan, headed to Seattle to catch a Seahawks game.  Although they lost miserably they had fun.  Phil really enjoyed getting to spend some "man" time with Dan.

Emma, mom and I made a quick trip to Bellingham for jeans and American treats at Target.  We went to Van Dusen gardens for the beautiful light display.  We had a wonderful Christmas morning opening gifts all together and making breakfast.  Christmas night we had a great dinner at Dan and Carly's, complete with Christmas Goose! 

Happy New Year everyone!