Cupcake Pops and Frazzled Nerves
I’ve been wanting to do Bakerella’s Cupcake Pops for quite some time now and I finally got my chance to last night. Boy, what an adventure that was. I ended up going to bed at just before 4 AM, which means I’m a zombie today, running on fumes.
Here’s the final batch before I wrapped them up. Let me assure you, these things squeezed every ounce of strength out of me. As usual with me, things never go quite as smoothly as they should.
We got home at around 8 after shopping for ingredients for the cake and dinner. Mr. Pikko bathed them while I started baking the cake, which I now realize I should have done the night before to avoid waiting around for it to cool. After it was in the oven, I was also browning hamburger in two pots for the two trays of lasagna I’d be preparing. While the cake cooled, I added sauce to the meat to let it simmer and then began boiling tons of noodles.
Around this time I brought out my bags of melting chocolate that I’d bought from Price Busters and was astounded to find that I’d mistakenly bought two bags of red melts instead of one red and one brown. I looked at the clock and it was 9:08, therefore Price Busters was closed. ARGH! After Twittering about it a bit, I settled on trying three different combinations of colors for the bottoms and tops.
When the cake was cooler, I crumbled it and mixed in the cream cheese frosting. I rolled the balls, popped them in the freezer, then began to layer the two lasagnas at the same time. When the time came to shape the balls into cupcakes, I found that my flower cookie cutter was a little too big, so I shaped them into cupcakes by hand. I put them back into the fridge and got to work melting the chocolate.
I used the microwave according to the package directions and tried to make pink with red and white wafers, but that didn’t go so well as you can see. It came out to a really dark pink. That was just the least of my problems though, the chocolate didn’t seem to be melting very well. It was a lot thicker than I thought it was supposed to be, which I guess might be because it wasn’t milk chocolate. Anyway, I decided to try to put the bowl of red on 30 seconds of high instead of at 50% power, not realizing that it would overheat the chocolate and cause it to harden. Oops! Thankfully, I’d been a boob and my two bags of red left me with enough to finish the cupcakes with red bottoms.
It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally got the hang of the dipping. Bakerella says to dip the sticks in the chocolate before sticking them in and I found out that this is a very important step. The sticks fall out if you don’t do it. The process was: 1) Take cupcake out of freezer. 2) Dip bottom. 3) Dip lollipop stick in chocolate and insert into cupcake. 4) Let dry. 5) Dip, roll, and spin the top in another color. 6) Add sixlet and sprinkles. 7) Let dry.
I got a lot faster at it, though I finished at 2 AM. At this point I was ready to bake the cake, but when I went looking for my The Cake Mix Doctor 
This morning when I went to get the van, the battery was dead, so we ended up late for school. *sigh* I ended up finding the cookbook in the car, jammed up against the front foot area. The plan right now is to bake and decorate the cake while everyone eats dinner. It’s been a long day and hopefully all the snafus are done! Any more and that’ll be it for my already frazzled brain, which is operating on 2 hours of sleep.