I was trying to get my inner-martha to surface and prove herself yesterday… don’t ask me why…
My attempt to re-create Bakerella’s Cake Pops yesterday ended up with nothing but a bunch of wasted time and a lot of orange pops in the trash… sigh.
I started off with the boxed red velvet cake – WRONG! My daughter made a r-v cake a month ago from scratch and it was fabulous… and it wasn’t all that hard, but silly me decides to go the even easier route and do the box brand… sorry, but after you’ve tasted it from scratch, the box stuff just doesn’t cut it. But so what, right? I’m adding frosting and candy coating to it, so it can’t be all that bad, right??
Next, the frosting… if I wasn’t going to make the cake from scratch, why would I make the frosting from scratch?? Yup, used the canned version… blech. But hey, it’s small little bites, and the candy coating can still save it…
Nope.
Like a big doofus, I ended up putting WAY too much shortening in the candy coating to make it to the desired consistency… Mind you, I NEVER use shortening, so had no clue as to how badly it would turn out… I was just going for consistency, never bothering to really taste it first…
So I do all the pops, and it’s okay… nowhere near the perfect round little marvels that Bakerella does (how does ANYONE make it perfectly round and the perfect size everytime???)… nope, mine were more realistic pumpkins… odd shaped, bumps all over, you know the deal…
But I go along my merry way and dip all the cake balls and towards the end, I was getting the coating to look pretty smooth and thought I was really getting the hang of it…
Then I tried to draw on the faces, but of course I didn’t get the right type of edible marker… I could barely get one little eyeball on there when it just stopped working… SHEESH! I just gave up and figured they’d be round little orange balls instead… that’ll still work right??
Then they dried, and I decided to try one… so in my excitement, I give one to each of the kiddos and hubby, and we all take a bite together… and we all made the same face together… BLECH! They tasted like burnt oil, slathered with some sugar to cover the taste. The kids, bless their hearts, tried to eat more and tell me that it was good, but there was NO WAY I was going to let keep eating them….
I didn’t even have the heart to take pictures, it was that bad…
Next time that inner-martha voice returns, I’m beating her down, leaving the job to the actual martha’s of the world, and going back to bed!