Usually, I have this strange craving to eat a lot of bad things for me on the weekend. That craving multiplies about 110% when it happens to be near that time of the month.
It's been a meltdown-free weekend though, so perhaps we have discovered that the key to keeping Brenda sane before Aunt Flo comes to town is to keep her well fed?
On Friday night, after lots of buildup about the surprise date we were going on, Ian took me to the Sweetwater Tavern in Falls Church for some after-dinner drinkin'. Really can't beat microbrews and my man all in one place.
After coffee with a friend on Saturday, I was feeling chipper and sufficiently caffeinated, so I snapped a pic of my enjoying the sunny day in my sunny day sunglasses (the ones I reserve for the sunniest of days) and the fact that I wasn't wearing a coat. Yes, it sure is the little things.
So when, much to my delight, cake mixes were 10 for $10 at Giant, I decided Saturday was finally going to be the day where I made cake pops. See, back in the day when I had a wedding to plan, I had at one point decided that I would hand-make thousands of these little guys for some fabulous favors. That motivation pretty much lasted until I went out and bought all the supplies to make them, and alas, packages of lollipop sticks and bags have been sitting in the cabinet. Until yesterday!
There is no shortage of cake pop tutorials in the blogosphere, so I pretty much gathered that you bake a cake, crumble it in a bowl, mix it with frosting, and mold it into cute little balls to be dunked in chocolate. I thought I would mix it up and dunk it in melted Reeses Peanut Butter chips.
However, have you ever tried to melt those things? They don't melt. Instead, they form a nasty, hard glob of peanut butter-like substance that hardens in about five minutes. So forget that.
I melted a big bowl of chocolate chips and quickly found that coating balls of rolled up, mashed together cake isn't as easy as it sounds. In short, it made a mess and I gave up and Ian and I played Scrabble.
But the next day, the stupid balls of cake were sitting on the counter. I had to finish the job, so I went back to Giant on a quest to find chocolate that's actually meant for dipping and coating things. Didn't find any.
So I settled for the next step: Google. Turns out if you melt chocolate chips on a double boiler and mix in some vegetable oil, it makes a lovely, smooth, chocolately mix perfect for coating your cake pops.
Don't have a double boiler? No worries! Just improvise with what you have.
Again, it made a mess, but this time I winded up with some pretty tasty truffle-like balls of candy coated cake. Which kind of looked like turds. So I rolled them in sprinkles just for shits and giggles.
Yes, this weekend sure tasted good.
