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.

Italian Cream Cake

For my roommate's (that would be Joy) dad's birthday, I made him an Italian Cream Cake, as per his request.

I've never actually tried Italian Cream Cake before, but I believe that I was missing out. It's quite the amazing cake.

Totally horrible for you, what with all the sugar and all, but there are walnuts (nuts are good for you, right?) and cream cheese (calcium? check!) and coconut (ummm, is coconut a fruit? Let's say that it is. Fruits are healthy) so it's not totally sinful.

What am I saying? It's so sinfully delicious. ;)

I suppose this is where the irony of being diabetic and a baker comes in.

I got the recipe on the Food Network's website, courtesy of Emril.

You should definitely consider making this yourself. Or building a time machine and going back in time so I can serve you a slice of the one I made. Because Lord knows I ate way too much of it myself. ;-)

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

Valentine Cookies, 2011 Edition

So let's ignore the fact that it's no longer Valentine's Day, and no longer even February, and in fact, it's no longer even wintertime, and talk about how cute these cookies are instead.

I made these cookies to give away to my friends and family, so there are at least a hundred.

My goal was to make the cutest cookies possible, and I'm not gonna lie, guys, these definitely fit that definition.

These cookies were especially awesome. You just put a bunch of dots on the wet (royal) icing and then draw a line through them with a toothpick. And then they look like little hearts!

But I really think the swirly cookies are my favorites. Some of them have luster dust on them, but that was really time consuming, so some the cookies are just swirly, not sparkly.

I made the cookies the day before Valentine's day, so Michael's was already starting to put the Valentine's items on clearance. I got those really cute heart sprinkles for a really great price.

And the heart shaped cookie cutter was only 50 cents! I did have a couple of cookie cutters on hand, but I left all my heart shaped ones at home! At first, I was just going to go with the circle and star shaped cookies, but thankfully, Michael's was right down the street!

I'm running out of interesting anecdote to tell you about these cookies, and I took a lot of pictures, so I'll just let the pics speak for themselves!

Ta-da! Happy belated Valentine's Day! :)