Happy Friday!

I emailed Megan's teacher yesterday to ask if it would be okay to bring a treat for the kids today. She loved the idea and said yes. I did make the little apples that I posted about yesterday, and they turned out so, so cute! I couldn't find the black edible markers that Bakerella used, so mine don't have faces. I'm not sure how it would have worked, anyway. Once the candy coating was on the "apples", mine began to sweat a little. I'm afraid the pen would have run. That's an experiment for another day, I suppose!

Here are a bunch of pictures of the process, since Lisa wanted to see it!

I didn't have any cake mix in the house, so I made the cake (devil's food!) from scratch. I almost felt bad about butchering the cake after it cooled, but it was necessary to make the cake pops.

After the cake was thoroughly destroyed, I added a can of icing and mixed. At this point, I could have eaten it as-is all by myself! YUM!

I used a small cookie scoop to get the balls, and then rolled them so that the tops were a little fatter than the bottoms. I made a small indention in the top (to make it look more apple-like, although some seem like a mixture of tomotaoes and cherries). I didn't get a picture of this stage. I put them on wax paper and into the fridge to firm up. This didn't work too well, and when I put them on the sticks, they kept sliding all the way through. I had to put them back into the freezer to get them even harder. While they firmed up, I emptied about 3/4 of a bag of red candy melts into a measuring cup and zapped them in the microwave to melt them.

After the cake balls were firm, I dipped them in the red candy coating, shook off the excess, and added my "stem & leaf" (pretzle stick and tiny green sprinkle). To dry, I shoved the sticks into a piece of styrofoam.

I wasn't sure how I was going to store them overnight so they wouldn't dry out. They won't fit in any tupperware containers that I have, and I wanted to keep them upright. I had little plastic bags and ribbon, so I ended up packaging each one individually, like a lolipop. They turned out so, so cute! I hope the class enjoys them!
All in all, although they were time consuming (I had to keep putting the cake balls back in the freezer because they were getting too gooey to dip), they were really pretty easy. The cute factor is through the roof, and Megan is going to be so excited to share them with her friends! I'll definitely try things from the Bakerella site again!