Easter Baking!

Easter is here!  That means it's time to bake!  Um, I mean it's time to celebrate Jesus' death & resurrection...with baked goods.

This year I wanted to try making Cake Pops.

I tried making these several years ago for our Oktoberfest party, and ended up with disfigured orange blobs that didn't even remotely resemble the jack-o-lanterns I was going for.

I was determined to do better this time.

I figured out a better way to roll the balls, so at least this far, I'm looking better than last time.

Of course, I'm making red velvet cake (with cream cheese frosting), so my hands were stained red for the rest of the day after I was done.

On an un-related side-note, I'm super excited to finally be fitting back into my wedding band post-baby!  Woo hoo!  I was starting to think I'd never see it again.

Dipping has always been my Achilles heel.  I can't ever seem to get the chocolate just the right consistency.  There is a VERY fine line between not melted enough (so you can't dip) and over-melted (so you can't dip either), so it's a complicated dance right along that line.

You might recognize these cups from our egg-dyeing experience a week ago.  This is actually why I bought the kit, although the cups didn't work so well for dipping eggs, they are perfect for cake pops!

All-in all, my pops turned outs...well...okay.  They weren't as shapeless and un-recognizable as my last attempt, but they certainly don't look anything like what you see in the books.

I was disappointed that my chicks all look so spastic, but Keith tried to pacify me by mentioning that the people on the websites & in the books probably aren't doing this for the first (or second) time.  Fine, but I still would have preferred that they were a little more recognizable.

I also discovered that as the pops come to room temperature (you freeze them for a while to harden up prior to dipping), the cake expands.  If they expand too much, the chocolate will crack.  Or, more entertainingly if there are any openings in the chocolate, the cake will ooze out.  Which is how I ended up with a few chicks with gunshot wounds.

But, if you add enough green plastic grass, they all look good. 

As someone who tries fairly hard to eat & cook whole, all-natural, and semi-organic foods, these cake pops go against everything I profess to believe in.  The cake is from a mix, the "chocolate" is probably half corn syrup, and the frosting actually contains HYDROGENATED oils (I thought those were illegal)!  So, yes, there's nothing natural (or healthy) about these pops, but they are yummy, and as long as we don't eat them every day, I thing we'll be okay...and Parker can't have any.

I'm also making a chocolate ganache cake.  But not just any chocolate ganache cake, this one is special...

Here's the cake part (it's hiding):

And the frosting:

You can't tell, but there's a secret inside...

I even had enough extra ganache for some chocolate covered-strawberries:

Although I haven't done this cake before, I have done the ganache before, and as you can see, it turned out much more visually appealing than my cake pops. Maybe Keith is right (don't tell him I said that), maybe practice does make things better.

Doesn't that look yummy?  Don't you wish you were coming to our Easter?  ...actually, most of you are, sorry Dianne!

Oh yeah, and those Macarons from Tuesday?  They weren't all a failure, that is also a recipe I"m going to have to practice if I want them to get better.