New Type of Sweets

I may be without a mixer, (which btw should be here tomorrow!! yay!) but I found a way to make and create anyway! Today I tried my hand at a fruit bouquet.  It’s hard to see some of the fruit but I attacked a pineapple with a couple cookie cutters, one a flower shape and the other one a butterfly shape.  I found that as long as you cut your slabs of pineapple thick enough, the cookie cutters work quite well. If they’re too thin, like a couple of mine were, they end up splitting when you insert the skewers.  Another interesting thing…I bought a cantaloupe to make melon balls for it.  I thought the orange would be a nice punch of color to it, however when I cut open my cantaloupe, the inside was green!  Of course the first thing I did was Google “Why is my cantaloupe green????”  The first obvious answer online was, “Cuz it’s a honeydew.”  Well now I don’t claim to be the smartest crayon in the box but I do know the difference between a honeydew and a cantaloupe! ha! So anyway, I never got an actual answer since there were so many different ones, but I tasted it and it tasted like a lovely nicely ripened cantaloupe, so I was good with that. It didn’t add the orange color I would have wanted but still turned out nicely nonetheless.  Stuck the skewered fruit in a tin flower pot filled with some flower foam that I found at the dollar store and added some kale around the edges of the pot for a leafy look and to cover some of the sticks and foam and there you go! I, of course, couldn’t take just fruit to an event, even if some of it was coated in chocolate. I needed to make sure we had a dash of sweet! So I then took some Oreos and smothered them in chocolate. There! Now that’s more like it for me!  As much as I enjoyed doing this kind of stuff today, I really do miss my baking so I can’t wait for my mixer to get here so I can try more experimenting! But for now, it’s nice to know the venture outside of my box proved worthwhile.

Mickey Mouse Cake Pops

I’ve watched tutorials on different types of cake pops, but these are ones that I’ve been wanting to try for some time now. There are different ways of making them, depending on what you read or watch. I had a birthday party to go to and I thought maybe a small bouquet of these would be cute as a gift. This little boy was a Mickey fan and also a Paw Patrol fan, so I decided to combine the two.

I started off with a regular cake pop made with a cake and buttercream mixture rolled into round balls. I decided to use mini Oreos for the ears, but I’ve read where some people use the actual chocolate melting wafers for the ears as well. I was afraid the wafers wouldn’t hold up as well when dipped in chocolate so I used the cookies. Keep in mind I chilled these in between steps just to make sure the colors didn’t mix and that the pops were stable. Once I had the chilled balls of pops, I dipped the small oreos (one side of the cookie) into the black chocolate about a third of the way and then put them where I wanted them into the pop. I chilled them after this for about 10 minutes. I then “took them by the ears” and dipped the bottom half of the pop into my red melted chocolate. It’s at this point that I dipped my stick in the red (about a centimeter depth) and put it into the bottom of my pop. I once again let these chill for a few minutes to make sure the stick stayed put and also to make sure when I put the black chocolate on, it didn’t mix with the red. Once these were solid I took them by the stick and dipped the top half of the pop into my black chocolate. I then let them chill as well. Shortly after that, I took my small candy piping bag with some melted white chocolate in it and I placed Mickey’s “buttons” on the bottom half of the pop. Voila! I had Mickey pops! Now, as these were easier than I had suspected, I would recommend that you use a dense cake to make these pops, as you’re really doing a lot with them and messing with them quite a bit. Other than that I was fairly pleased for a first timer and it really looked cute as a small bouquet. I then sent them home with the little boy and his mother thanked me for the sugar rush he would have later on! Hey, what are friends for?! If anyone has another way of doing these, perhaps easier or just any feedback, feel free to let me know. Enjoy!