I Am Not Perfect (at cake pops)

Around this part of the country, the common response to "I'm not perfect" is "Only Jesus is perfect."  Since I'll never be anything close to Jesus, I know I should try to let go of the blame and self-recrimination I feel every time I try to use candy melts.  And fail.  

But I can't let it go.  

All these cake pop people on Pinterest, and the queen of cake pops, Bakerella herself, make it look so simple.  In fact, my inspiration for these cake pops came from a blog post that called them--and I quote--'easy to make.'  So easy her toddler helped her.

The cake pop that my child is pretending to eat?  It's supposed to be a Lego head.  Yeah.  I know.  It's bad.  It was all going great until I hit the candy melt stage, and then nose dive.  I'm terrified to melt it too long or it will seize up.  Been there, thrown that away.  There is some sweet spot between not hot enough (thick substance) and too hot (solid ruined substance) where the candy melts are supposed to be thin and runny.  You're supposed to be able to just dip the dang cake into the chocolate, gently tap off the excess, and have a glossy beautiful pop.  But no.  No.

So here is how I made not perfect Lego cake pops.

I bought a cake mix and frosting.  (GAH!)  Serious, they are going to be demolished by 8 year olds who won't care, and I just didn't have time to do scratch for a cake that was going to get crumbled up and mixed with frosting.  So there.  Anyway, I baked the cake, I crumbled it into pieces, I mixed it with the can of frosting.

That part went great.  I formed them into balls, and then rolled the balls into cylinders.

 

Check, check.  Still going great.  It hit me at this point that they looked like marshmallows, and that next time I should just try using marshmallows for this instead.  But anyway, still going fine.  I needed some type of candy on the top to make the little bump that would connect with the Lego hair or the Lego hat.  I used Bottlecaps, adhered with some glaze.

All going great, I popped them into the refrigerator for a half hour, then pulled them out.  I melted just a small amount of candy melts, twirled each stick in melted 'chocolate' and inserted the sticks carefully into the bottoms of the cake pops.

Still going great.  I put them in the freezer.  And then I melted the candy melts and mixed them with yellow glaze food coloring.

And then the horrors started.  I dipped one pop in.  I couldn't even twist it.  I worried the cake pop would come off the sucker stick if I attempted to tap it on the side to get rid of some of the stuff.  I got out a butter knife.  I should have just given up at this point.  To make it all work, I had to essentially frost every stupid cake pop with the candy melts, heating the stuff periodically when it got too hard.  Unfortunately it was next to impossible to make that little top piece look like what it was supposed to look like, and I couldn't get an even surface.

By this time I'd invested a good stretch of time on these.  I was getting really mad.  I took out the black icing, just like the blog post I read suggested, and the toothpick recommended, and I attempted to draw Lego faces.  

That's when I found my way out of this disaster.  These cake pops were supposed to be birthday treats for Eli on Thursday--he's turning eight, and he's the resident Lego maniac.  Eli begged to get to draw the faces.  If I can say Eli helped with these cake pops, then I don't have to be so embarrassed if he takes them to school and adults actually see them.

That's probably mean, right?  But this is the deal.  Here are two of Eli's creations:

He's so proud of them.  He's so excited about them.  He can't wait to take them to his friends.  He humbles me.  Only Jesus is perfect.  But my kids come dang close.