Cake pops for CHOC

Every year I've been doing a fundraiser at work for our TeamWalk called "Breakfast at your Desk", including this year for CHOC. For a donation, a group of us would make an assortment of things and deliver a breakfast of say, quiche, sausage, potatoes, fruit salad, hot beverage, and juice. Also I would make a sweet little treat for later.

This year I wanted to try to make these mini-cupcake bites and cake pops. They were featured on Martha Stewart and in theory, were easy to make. So I bought all the stuff--ingredients, molds, lollipop sticks, and all.

Holy crap. These were totally a pain in the a$$ to make.

First, shame on me for trying something completely new the day before they needed to be made. Second, I don't have a working microwave, so I was trying to keep the candy melts liquified the old-fashioned way--in a hot water bath. Do you have any idea how fast hot water goes tepid? Let me tell you: maddeningly fast. I never got the chocolate beyond a soft margarine consistency and instead of dipping into it, I had to practically spread the soft chocolate on with a knife. And finally, each step was sooo time-consuming, though I'm not sure if my melted chocolate issue was the key cause of that. I started around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday and was still smearing thick chocolate after midnight.

Anyhoo, here are cake pops--the girl helped me decorate a bunch:

She channeled her inner Tim Burton and managed to give some of them a spooky sock puppet look like this one:

And these were the mini cupcake bites:

Not quite like the picture, but they were still delicious. I'm selling the extras as a fundraiser--wish me luck!