Sunday, April 17, 2011

Guest Blogger Julie from Home Baked Stuff

Please welcome Calamity Kate's first guest blogger, Julie from Home Baked Stuff

I am so excited to introduce you all to Julie from Home Baked Stuff! She is a newish blogger and just as sweet as can be. Check out this amazingyeast cinnamon bread!

I am thrilled to share Calamity Kate with you Julie!


Baby love.

Ive long dreamed of making Bakeralla’s cake pops.  I figured they would be super easy and something fun to do with my 3 year old.  Anyone who has baked with a 3 year old knows what I’m talking about.  I tried to make pops for his 3rd birthday at the end of March, and I realized it was going to be much harder than anticipated.  The whole process took 5 hours, 2 rounds of baking, and in the end, I couldn’t get any of them to stay on the stick, and they certainly looked nothing like the train cookie cutter I used.

So I vowed to try again, and I was determined to do it well for Kate’s blog.  You have to do something special to impress new friend’s right?  So I did.  I came home from work and decided that no matter what tonight was the night I was going to make wonderfully tasty and beautiful cake pops!  I pulled out a simple chocolate cake recipe (mixed and baked in the same pan!) from the Joy of Baking website, and pulled out the tub of icing Ive had in my pantry since Christmas and got down to business.

Of course being me, I couldn’t just make the cake the way I was told to.  I had to jazz it up, sometimes this works other times not so much…  Lucky for me, It worked, and my chocolate cake was wonderfully infused with navel oranges.  I think it’s the best tasting chocolate cake Ive ever made.

So my son and I got down to business and ripped the cake to shreds.  One for the bowl, one for Mommy, one for the boy…  He was quite amused to be told to crumble the cake and get his little fingers dirty.

Remembering Bakerella’s instructions to go light on the icing at first, we added the icing, and lucky for me I showed restraint and only used half the tub, it was more than enough.  The mixture was fluffy and sticky, easy to roll into ping pong sized balls. In all I ended up with 30 balls.  They promptly went to the freezer to set.

This is where I started to panic.  It was 8pm.  My son goes to bed at 8:30…  Am I going to make a night of it, and let him stay up…  Deal with the fall out in the morning, or do I postpone until tomorrow, which would be completely acceptable.  Then I admitted to myself that I’m a die hard.  There was no way I was going to fall asleep unless I saw this little project to the end.  So I melted the chocolate, zested the orange, pulled out my pop sticks and moved on..

I have a small kitchen, so my workspace is often improvised with a large cutting board.  I set up my dipping and decorating workstation on my stove and hoped for the best.

Stick, dip, sprinkle, stick, dip, sprinkle..  I dare you to say that 10 times fast!  It was a slow process and each time I dipped I was so careful about the cake not crumbling in to the melted chocolate.  In the end it all worked out.  Beautiful cake pops sprinkled with chocolate jimmies and orange zest.
I let my son stay up until 9:45.  I think it was worth it.  He ate 2 pops before bed; he even licked the chocolate off the plate.


2 comments:

  1. Yum! I love chocolate and orange together! xo

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm trying my hand at doing a link party of sorts and would love it if you'd share one of your favorite recipes of the week, like this fantastic one.

    http://pinchofthisthatandtheother.blogspot.com/2011/04/whisking-wednesdays.html

    ReplyDelete


Hello and thanks for visiting Calamity Kate Kitchen. I'm so glad you enjoyed the recipes and stories to leave a comment! Please excuse our word verification, but lots of spammers have been leaving their comments and those comments are not appropriate. Anyways, thanks for stopping by and I can't wait to read your comments!
Cheers, Kate