Pop Goes the Cake Pop

Happy Spring, everyone! There's no better way to ring in the spring season than with a couple inches of snow, right? Oh wait, a better way is with some lovely Spring cake pops!

As background, I have an adorable Christmas cake pop cookbook and my friend and I were toying with incorporating cake pops into our Christmas baking tradition. But since Christmas is so high-stakes, it was critical to do a test run (and just a good excuse for baking in general). We had a few options of springtime cake pops (courtesy of bakerella) to consider but we opted for the easiest one after my cake pop decorating fail a couple years ago. Our goal: Spring Chicken Cake Pops. Based on the picture on the website, they looked so freakin cute! Obviously that will mean that it is an unattainable standard but who cares? Onward!

Step one is obviously to bake the cake. Since the goal was to flex our cake pop decorating muscles, we opted for the easy way out and just made boxed cake. Basically nothing notable there. Once the cakes were ready and cooled and we were caffeinated with Starbucks, we split the cake in half so we each got the relaxing opportunity to crumble the cake into pieces. It's honestly so soothing! I'm not even sure why! We mixed in some chocolate icing with the chocolate cake (mmmmm...chocolate...) and we took some extra care to make the balls very smooth and perfect since our goal was decorating them nicely. After we rolled them up, we stuck them in the freezer to solidify a bit. Sorry, this part isn't that interesting. Let's fast forward to we've already melted some chocolate and stuck the sticks into the balls and re-frozen them.

On to decorating!

The obvious first step was to dip the balls in melted bright yellow chocolate. Let the mindless tedium begin! There's a bit of technique to it though. Basically, it's a dip, a roll, and a tap. Or many taps. As in you keep tapping the lollipop stick against the side of the chocolate bowl until all of the excess chocolate drips off. But don't tap too hard! Otherwise, your cake ball will dramatically fall off of the stick and into your chocolate. Or if you don't rotate as you tap, you end up with thicker parts of chocolate and streaks on one side of your cake pop. It's a very scientific process. About one third of our way through our pop dipping, we both simultaneously had our cake balls fall off the sticks. We determined that this was because they were getting too warm so we threw them back in the freezer. Meanwhile, I fished my fallen soldier out of the chocolate and realized that I needed more chocolate anyway so I melted more in the same bowl. After it melted, I realized, "Hmm, now there are chunks of chocolate cake in my smooth, yellow chocolate. Perhaps that is not ideal if the goal is to get a nice smooth coating of yellow chocolate." So I threw out that batch of chocolate. Womp womp.

Now, dedicated readers will recall that last time I did this, I had issues with the thickness of the chocolate. This time I didn't. I don't know why because it's not like I did anything differently. Somehow, the chocolate just worked this time. Maybe the temperature in my kitchen was different? Oh well. In any case, after about an hour, we managed to dip all of the chocolate balls. Success! There was one harrowing moment where it seemed like the balls were sweating moisture from being too cold when they were dipped in warm chocolate but there were only a few isolated cases and the issue didn't persist.

So those were the easy parts. Now for the actual "making them adorable" part. By now, my mom had arrived and joined in the decorating. To make spring chicken cake pops, one uses different shaped sprinkles (we found a great mixture of sprinkles at Michael's) to glue on (with chocolate) a beak, wings, and feet. Then you use an edible ink pen to add eyes. Aaaaaaaand that's it. Simple, right? Actually, yes. It is simple. Don't get me wrong, it's tedious and slow-moving and annoying trying to pick up the correct color and shape sprinkles but on the whole, it's not too hard. But you know what else it is? Boring. As cute as these are, they are not worth the effort in the least. That said, it was satisfying knowing that we could accomplish near-perfect spring chicken cake pop decorating:

And then we got bored. We made about...6 chickens as we had been directed to and then we wandered off into our own land of crazy. At this point, I literally raided my kitchen for any candies or random things that could be used to decorate cake pops. It was a good way to get rid of Easter candy from last year! (Don't judge.) Now for some insight into our crazy minds, I present for your judgement our collection of insane cake pops!

This was honestly so boring to us that we didn't even decorate all of them. And I'm not terribly creative so while some of those are mine, the vast majority of my cake pops followed the directions and I just kept making chickens. But hey, some of them had BLUE eyes instead of BLACK eyes! That's creativity right there! Or not.

So the grand conclusion is that there will not be Christmas cake pops next year because as cute as they are, they were just too boring and time-consuming to make. On the bright side, these were ready just in time to share with people for pi day!

A Disney Moment: Tangled

Ah, I love that we're watching good movies now. Now, I'll tell you the rating up front (it's a 2/5) because it's a somewhat controversial opinion to rank Princess and the Frog above Tangled. I will say though, they were very very close. Tangled is really funny. But it doesn't have the same emotional hits as Princess and the Frog. Tangled also has the previously discussed "too many sidekicks issue" and errs on the side of slapstick.

All that said, here's what I do like about it: the music (especially since the songs now seem to be crossing back into the intelligent lyric realm), the fun of it, the ending loophole (I love a good loophole that gets the protagonists out of certain death), and the Mother character. She's a great one. And I really do love the somewhat dark undertones of the movie. I remember the first time I saw it and walking out of the theater saying, "Did I really just see a Disney comedy about Stockholm's syndrome?" And the demise of Mother is pretty fantastic. I also liked the somewhat unconventional left turn of the ending not ending in a wedding. Because that's a very Disney thing to do but this movie nicely gives all the power to the women in the movie. Which is a whole other topic that I won't get into. But overall, the movie is really fun and I like it a lot but it gets just barely beaten by Princess and the Frog who wins for its grace, beauty, and complexity.

ThrowBAKE Monday

See what I did with the title there? It's basically the epitome of my cleverness. As you should have gathered by now, I'll be blogging (finally) about a baking project (at last) from way back when. No, seriously, it's from April. That's so many months, I don't even know how long that is! Anyway, get excited because this is something new, something exciting, something trendy. That's right: cake pops! My first foray into the world of cake pops. Are you excited yet? You should be.

To set the stage, I was invited to my future cousin-in-law's bachelorette party. I say future because at the time it was future but by the time I'm writing this, they're married sooooooo....whatever. Bachelorette party! And what is better at a bachelorette party than cake pops! And what better time to start them is the night before the party/weekend? That's what I thought too. So, the night before I had to leave for the party, I was up late making cake pops. Which I've never made before. But how hard could they be? I got all the ingredients and I decided that since the color theme of the weekend was blue and yellow that I would make sky blue cake pops with yellow polka dots. See? Nothing crazy. I'm keeping it simple. I even used boxed cake mix and canned frosting rather than make it myself. I'm getting reasonable in my old age.

So cake pops are actually quite easy (in theory). You bake the cake. Let it cool. Crumble it into a zillion pieces. Mix in frosting (about 3/4 of the can). Roll into balls. Put in sticks. Dip in chocolate. Decorate as needed. Easy. I decided to go with chocolate cake (I believe I used Duncan Hines double fudge cake because, of course) and cream cheese frosting. I was hoping to avoid it getting too sweet with all of the chocolate and everything. Baking the cake was a piece of...cake...yeahhhhhh...I couldn't resist that pun but now I don't know where to go from here. I'll just pretend that never happened. You know what's really fun? Crumbling cake with your bare hands. Seriously, I enjoyed it and spent about half an hour doing it while watching an episode of 30 Rock. Next, I mixed in the frosting. I found that the best way to do this was to squish it all together with the backside of a big metal spoon. It was surprisingly good at incorporating the frosting into every bit of the crumbs. Then I rolled them into balls and tossed them into the freezer to harden up a bit.

Here's where things got a little tricky. Dipping in chocolate. I melted my chocolate wafers and the chocolate was really thick. Definitely wasn't going to make dipping easy at all. I read somewhere that you can add some vegetable oil to thin it out a bit and thus began the process of microwaving and stirring and trying to find the right consistency. Also, I should point out that by now it was awfully late. Anyway, I started out with dipping the lollipop stick in the chocolate so that it would be like glue inside the cake pop, stuck the stick into the cake ball, and then gently rolled the ball in the chocolate and let the excess drip off. Doesn't that sound so pleasant and easy? It wasn't. The chocolate was still really thick and sometimes the cake balls would fall of the stick and get stuck in the chocolate. Sometimes the chocolate would drip all the way down the stick. Sometimes the cake pop would hold on just fine until I stuck it into the blocks of styrofoam (which I legitimately have no idea why I had) and then the cake ball would sadly slide halfway down the lollipop stick. Needless to say, it was a little frustrating to have such inconsistency. Plus it was late. Plus I kept running out of chocolate. Plus it was never the right consistency. But whatever, eventually, all the cake pops were coated in chocolate.

Now to decorate them! And keep in mind, all I'm doing is yellow polka dots! Yeah, no. Not happening. I polka dotted two of them and decided they looked stupid so I stopped. They just came out spikey and weird and I didn't like it. Blue cake pops it is! Late night Jen makes the best decisions. Zak got in on the decorating a little bit and made one that said "Hi!" and another with a happy face and a third with a penis (not pictured) because ya know, it's a bachelorette party! Our beautiful work is displayed below for your judgement:

But now that they were all done, how did they taste? Awesome. They were really delicious, albeit a bit sweet for me. But it's cake with frosting and coated in chocolate so it's hard for it to not be sweet. The girls at the party demolished them though. They were a great drunk bachelorette party food. And it was funny because as frustrating as they were, when people were asking me how I made them, my first response was "oh, it's really easy..." Funny how memory works, isn't it?

A Disney Moment: Lilo and Stitch

I remember seeing Lilo and Stitch in theaters when it first came out. It was actually somewhat notable in that it was in the pre-Pixar-rip-your-heart-out era. (And before you say anything, I know Toy Story 2 came out before that but it didn’t crush my soul as much on the first viewing as it does now.) I just remember sitting in the theater and crying my eyes out because I couldn’t figure out what loophole they were going to find to keep Lilo and Stitch together and to keep Lilo and her sister together! I just couldn’t see the way out for these characters! Maybe it was my age or something but it’s the first time I remember really crying at an animated film as an adult-ish person. All that said, this movie doesn’t hold up to that memory that I have.

It certainly has its touching moments and there’s some great messaging about unconventional families but there are some visual and storytelling hurdles that the movie doesn’t quite overcome. The whole Ugly Duckling comparison is extremely heavy-handed, the Elvis bits just feel stupid on the rewatch, and OH MY GOD, LILO’S SISTER’S LEGS! No human’s legs look like that! She has no ankles and her thighs are tree trunks. I’m not even sure she has knees. It’s more than I could handle. This surprised us by not ranking the highest in the group of five and instead landed at 2/5. Soon you shall see why.