Hi All – Christmas is here, well almost! Are you ready? I almost ready, using today to get the final stuff done. (Which for me is the last of the wrapping and making a dessert for tomorrow.) I’ve been busy the last few weeks making things and wrapping and stuff.
I made some yummy chocolate turtles (using the slow cooker method as I said I was going to in this post). They turned out awesome, the caramel worked out perfectly using that method. I packaged a bunch of them up and gave most of they away with cards to some friends and family.
Another thing I did was make cake pops for a kids party. I think that they turned out pretty good (not store quality, but good for my first time). I used a Styrofoam cone, wrapped in tissue paper and glued to a plate to stick the cake pop’s in.
To make the cake pops I just read a few tutorials online and followed those. Basically I made a sheet cake, let it cool. Then I crumbled it up in a bowl and added cream cheese icing and mixed it all together. I just added a bit at a time until I could form little balls of dough. Then I made all the balls and left them in the fridge overnight (I didn’t have time to decorate them at that time).
The next day I took the cake balls out of the fridge and let them warm up to room temperature (so they wouldn’t crack the chocolate from being too cold). The I melted the chocolate, stuck lollipop sticks into the balls (using chocolate on the ends to make them stay in) and started to decorate. It was a real pain at first, I did the snowman ones first and the white chocolate was such a pain!
The reindeer ones were a bit easier to do but I didn’t have an edible pen so I had to figure out how to do the eyes…I ended up cutting about 100 yogurt covered raison’s until I had enough un-cracked ones to use as the eyes. (Some look a little bit googly but they didn’t turn out too bad.)
Once they had solidified in the fridge for a few minutes I put them in the holder.
They must have tasted good to a bunch of 3 year olds as they disappeared pretty quickly. (-:
I also made the chocolate house for my baby-sitter’s family. There is lots of kids with all the cousins and stuff so they love getting the houses and I love to make them. Maybe next year I will make one for my boys for one of the kids parties we go to…maybe! (My oldest cannot handle a lot of sugar, he is a spirited kid to begin with so giving his straight sugar is…well…interesting.)
I turned this -
Into this -
I normally put more candies on the house and less on the plate but the stores were out of melting chocolate so I had to use a really high quality chocolate, which tastes great, but does not stick things together very well.
I also made these chocolate, peanut butter oatmeal squares…which are so sinfully delicious that I gave a bunch of those away as well…there was too much sugar in them for my thighs!
And I also made this fudge wreath that is going around Pinterest…looks pretty cool but haven’t tasted it yet to know if I would make it again. I used red and green peanut M&M’s instead of the candied cherries.
That was the last of my baking for the Christmas holidays. I am not hosting it this year either so no big meals to cook either…hoping to enjoy things this year with my boys.
