All booked up

One of my co-workers is retiring. She is the librarian for our Assistive Technology-Instructional Materials library at the Special Education collaborative I work for.

Not only is my friend super amazing, we spent some fun times outside of work going swing dancing so I wanted to do something extra, extra special for her retirement. It helped that we had two parties for her.

Our first party was at the office. I made her a Kransekaka (I have made it before, see the link here for Rings of Glory for more information). I tried a different recipe, nearly identical to this link from Artic Grub.

The difference from the online recipe is that I made chocolate icing and put on little flower shaped sprinkles. Traditionally you put a bottle of wine inside. But I didn't want anyone to get in trouble at work, so there is a small bottle of lemon flavored Perrier inside.

Later in the month we had a party outside of work at a local bar and grill. Here is where I got more creative. Since she is a librarian, I made books on a stick!

Here is how I made them:

1. I made a from scratch, yellow cake in a cookie sheet (or jelly roll pan, which is what we called them growing up) and cut them into rectangles




2. I melted a few candy melts in a bowl. I dipped the sticks into the candy and then poked
the rectangles. I froze the cake pops for 30 minutes.
 

3. I dipped the cake pops in white candy melts and let them dry. Sorry no picture of that.

4. Then I cut the sugar sheets into rectangles with a kitchen scissors.


I wrote on a few of the sugar sheet rectangles with Wilton writing pens (food coloring). Treating the candy melts like glue, I spread a little of melted candy on the cake pop. I wrapped the cut sugar sheet around the cake pop like a book cover.

 

5. Then I rolled out some shape-n-amaze edible dough and cut out book mark shapes with a knife. I used a little melted candy as glue again to keep the bookmark on the cake pop.

Ta-da!

Then I ran out of sugar sheets! Here is the bad part about baking at 11pm at night. No store with sugar sheets would be open. So I had to improvise. I rolled out some of the shape and amaze and used it as book covers. I used scraps of yellow sugar sheets to make yellow bookmarks.

The best was that my friend LOVED the the cake pops and they were completely personalized to her.

Now Bake That!

Crazy Creepin' Creeper Cake Pops

There is something you should know about most boys I know under the age of twelve. They're all addicted. 

To Minecraft. 

Yep. That fuzzy block shaped, animated video game featuring Lego inspired robots, sheep, spiders, diamond swords and creepers has invaded my life. It is on my phone, my husband's phone, my iPad, my husband's iPad, my laptop and our Xbox. The only good part of this game is now my youngest child has something in common with his cousin who lives two states away, whom he sees only once a year and is five years older than him. These two boys talked two hours about Minecraft. Whoa.

My oldest child was turning ten this year. He chose to have his first sleep over birthday party this year. The theme was of course...video games. Not that it was really a theme, just justification for creeper cake pops. After some surfing on google images, I made my own.

 

Molded cake pops are my second choice. I prefer cutting my cake into shapes. I baked a from scratch yellow cake and using a ruler, cut cubes.

  

 2. I melted a handful of candy melts from Wilton and dipped each stick into the cake. I froze the cake pop in the freezer for 30 minutes. Then I melted the rest of the green candy melts. I dipped and then let it dry.


3. Then came the conundrum. How do I get the faces on there? I tried two methods using Wilton products: Shape-n-Amaze and Cookie icing in a glue shaped bottle. I actually thought the cookie icing looked nicer (it was shiny). However, the Shape-n-Amaze was far easier to do, so I went with that for the rest of the cake pops.

I don't know why I fussed. The kids didn't care. They were thrilled they were creepers!

Now Bake That!