Hope everyone had a great Valentine’s Day!   I made a bunch of Valentine’s themed cake balls that I sold for “donations” for charity!   This cute little flower arrangement was sold for a $15 donation.

I decided to just make a few of each of these instead of trying to make full batches of each one.  These are extremely labor intensive as just one dozen of these took me about 2.5 hours to decorate.   Granted, that included dyeing the chocolate to the right colors first.  But each Santa Hat had to be dipped twice and reassembled with the stick each time.   The trees took the longest since this was mostly a timing issue.  Had to make it look like a tree and put the star on before the chocolate set.   The stars didn’t all make it before the chocolate set, so had to glue them on as well as each “light” individually.   I have come to find out that I don’t have very steady hands.  Good thing I didn’t become a surgeon!    The snowmen were pretty similiar to the ghosts I made for Halloween, so that was easy for me.  Hope you like them!

Ever since I got Bakerella’s Cake Pop book, I couldn’t wait for the holidays to come around because I wanted to make every single one of them!   Started off with the reindeer.   I couldn’t find the alphabet pretzels that she recommended using, so I just used regular pretzels and broke them into pieces.   The noses were made out of either red hots, red peanut M&Ms (cut in half) or red sours (cut in half).

I had a bunch of yellow candy melts left over from doing the Easter chicks.    I also had a whole container of pastel colored candy corn that I never used, so I took a cue from Bakerella and made some Mother’s Day Flowers.   Hers came out so much nicer, though.

I’ve been having a tough time with the Wilton brand of candy melts.  I use a little ceramic cup and melt the candy melts in the microwave.  I just can’t seem to get it liquidy (is that even a word?!) enough that it will drip from the lollipop stick.  It usually just clumps.   I’m going to have to experiment with some other brands.   I’ve even tried putting a little vegetable/canola oil in it, but that doesn’t seem to help much at all.  Anyone out there have any suggestions?

In the middle of the flowers, I used chocolate covered sunflower seeds that I found at Trader Joe’s.   The candy corn I found during the Easter holiday at Michael’s.

These baby chicks were so ready to come out, and they finally hatched just in time for Easter!   Hope everyone has a great Easter and eats lots of chocolate!

Springtime is here and the baby chicks are getting ready to arrive just in time for Easter!

Looking for something different to make for Easter, I went with this.  I don’t even have a name for it.  Pre-chick?   The inspriation came from a cartoon  image in an online coloring book.  As soon as I saw it, I just KNEW I had to try to duplicate it.  These took quite some time to assemble, as it was pretty time consuming and sticky trying to make the legs.  I used some peanut marshmallows, and cut them up with a knife and formed them to make legs.  Using a black, edible ink marker, I drew the cracks on the egg.

I just can’t stop looking at these!   Everytime I look at this picture, I just giggle and giggle and giggle with a crazy grin on my face!  Stay tuned to see what the baby chicks look like after they’ve hatched!

Texas Hold’em took the world by storm a few years ago.   I have a friend who loves to play poker and is pretty darn good at it, too.  Her husband also plays pretty well, and they go to Vegas quite frequently.  My friend hosts a women’s poker tournament every other weekend at her house.   I had gotten an idea of making some poker chip cake pops and thought it’d be nice to take them to the women’s poker tournament instead of having them in my kitchen tempting me!

Initially, I wanted to use fondant as the stripes for the chips, but never having dealt with fondant before, my first attempt was a complete disaster!    As the start time of the poker tournament quickly approached, I decided to just use my edible ink markers and color in the stripes instead.

The tournament players got a kick out of them and loved eating them!

Next is to find someplace local to take a fondant class.  Got any tips or tricks you’d like to share with me about dealing with fondant?   How about your favorite fondant book or fondant YouTube video?

I thought for a while what kind of cake balls or cake pops I would make for St. Patrick’s Day.     I wanted something more than just cake balls colored green, or topped with green/white sprinkles or four leaf clovers.  Everyone seemed to be doing that.    While browsing the internet, looking for some inspiration, I found a cute little drawing of a leprechaun.  THAT’S what I wanted to do!    Trying to figure out how to pull this off, I used Bakerella’s Snowman Cake Pop creation as the basis for my Leprechauns.

I only made these 5 leprechauns as they were a real chore to make.  The hats were SO heavy, it was hard to get them to “glue” to the top of the heads.  Attaching the cotton candy beards to the heads was a sticky situation at best.

After about an hour, the beards pretty much disintigrated and/or fell off!   I should have seen that coming, but I sure did have a good giggle about it.   I wonder what else I could have used for the beards instead that would not fall apart or disappear?  Do you have any suggestions?   Leave me a comment if you’ve got any suggestions on how I could improve the leprechauns for next time.

Since Valentine’s Day is this week, I thought I’d try my hand at some Valentine’s Day themed cake pops.  I found some red, white and pink candy corn that would work well to duplicate Bakerella’s Flower Cake Pops.   I bought a few boxes of conversational hearts to use for decoration as well.  (I didn’t really need a few boxes, but I knew I needed extra to munch on or else I’d eat them all.)

One of the things I’ve been working on and trying to figure out how how to get the chocolate as smooth as I can on the cake pop.  This is probably one of the most time consuming steps since I have to lightly tap the lollipop stick to get rid of all the excess chocolate while twirling it to keep everything smooth.   Once they hardened up, I dipped a toothpick in the melted chocolate and “painted” a little bit on the back of a conversational heart and “glued” it to the cake pop.   You have to hold it onto the pop for a few seconds so the “glue” can harden up or else the candy will just slide down the pop.  I can’t believe the conversational hearts now say stuff like “TWEET ME”!   Really?

The flower cake pops came out pretty good, considering it was my first time attempting something so involved.   Just as the cake pops with the conversational hearts, I had to use chocolate to “glue” on each piece of candy corn one at a time, and hold it in place for a few seconds to make sure it didn’t fall off.   Making this half-dozen of Valentine’s Day Flower Cake Pops took about an hour and a half, which includes the dipping and glueing.   I didn’t eat any of the flower pops, but I did munch on some of the candy corn, and I can only imagine that these cake pops would definitely send someone into suger overload.  I gave them away to friends and was informed later they were pretty tasty!