The Golden Snitch

In honor of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part 2) premiering tonight, my best friend Hillary and I made some Potterlicious cake balls. And obviously we chose the snitch because it plays such a vital role in the movies plot, and has nothing to do with the fact that snitches are round and therefore the perfect cake ball shape.



I found out that making cake pops is a lot easier than it was last time, because I found out you gotta put chocolate on the stick before you stick it in the cake. Like so:

The wings were a pain in my backside, though. I had a huge problem painting them silver. Originally, they were going to be spray painted silver, with Duff's cake graffiti...

But for some reason, the spray can stopped working after I did 2 pairs of wings. I'm really disappointed. I'm also sad that I still haven't gotten my airbrush machine, then I could've sprayed the wings silver and the cake part gold (Michael's doesn't sell gold cake graffiti). I ended up painting the wings with a silver glaze, which I personally think doesn't look as neat.

Plus, the painting took forever, and it was super messy.

The final cake balls looked really awesome, though. I used yellow candy melts, and gold dust mixed with lemon juice to make it sparkly and snitch like. Pretty fabulous, if I do say so myself. :)

When I ran out of wings, I covered the pops in gold sprinkles. Totally messy and not as pretty but they tasted good!



We also make cockroach clusters!

With real cockroaches! Just kidding. They're made with potato sticks and they are delicious. And also messy, but that's because it's hot and the chocolate melted.



So that's our adventure making Harry Potter sweets for the last movie! The candy trolly lady would be proud.

Peanut Butter Cake Balls

Don't those look amazing?!

My cake ball craving has been satisfied. I made some peanut butter cake balls the other day! After consulting with my favorite picky eater (my sister Katie) to choose a flavor, we settled on peanut butter. The other contenders were strawberry limeade, chocolate/orange, pina colada, and raspberry. I still haven't ruled out those flavors, though, and I'll probably make them when I get back to school (lots of taste testers on a college campus!)



But let's get back to the peanut butter! It's a yellow cake with vanilla icing and peanut butter (and a little milk)-- super easy. I dunked them in semi-sweet chocolate, which was tempered of course. (I hate tempering chocolate. But I also hate confectionary coating, so I went with the lesser of two evils. The thing is, tempering chocolate is a Pain. In. The. Butt. I use the "Cooking for Engineers" method, but if you can think of an easier one, let me know!)

A picture of a basketball for reference. (Just in case somebody needed it.)

So next I'd like to make some kind of cute cake pops, but I haven't really settled on a design I like yet. However, I plan to flip through Bakerella's book tomorrow and get some good ideas. Right now all I can think of is basketballs (because they're round [unlike those awful easter eggs] and they're all one color [mostly]. I think I'm just being lazy, though).

Easter Cake Balls

I only got a picture of the purple ones, but there were also pink, white, and chocolate "eggs"

I am a terrible blogger, and I did not take any picture of the cute cake balls that I made for Easter, except for one poorly lit picture taken with my camera phone. I apologize.



They were nowhere NEAR as cute as the Easter Egg cake pops that Bakerella made, and I have insane respect for her cake pop making skills. I had no idea how difficult it was to make egg-looking cake balls, until I actually tried it.



It's a lot harder than it looks. Plus, you gotta get all the sprinkles on there, and sometimes the balls fall off the sticks, and they all looked lumpy...



I made 150 of the pops, though, to give away to my friends and professors on campus. Strawberry, yellow, and chocolate cake, with white (it was also pink and purple) or milk chocolate. Needless to say, I definitely got some good practice in. And thankfully, they still tasted amazing!



Maybe one day my pops will be good enough to be featured on Bakerella's blog in the Pop Star section, but then again, maybe I should just stick with cupcakes and cakes?

Edit: I lied. I did find one more picture saved on my phone:

Don't judge. This was only my first attempt. :-P