Happy October! While looking for costumes for the boys online I ran across tons of really cute ones that I wanted to share. This is a two part Saturday Stumbles post. The second half (being posted this afternoon) has costumes for preschool girls and boys. Click on a picture to be taken to the website the costume was found on.
Spooktacular Cake Pops
I love to bake but I don’t do it very often. I kept hearing people talk about making cake pops but they always seemed too time consuming and difficult to make. Looking through the September 2011 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal I came upon an article entitled, “Bake Sale Treats”, and it shared a recipe for cake pops that made it seem easier than I had thought it would be. I decided to make them with the help of Sinisa and two little taste testers, Jacob and Lucas.
I headed to Michaels to get the supplies I needed to make cake pops. To see more about my shopping trip to Michaels and all the Fall items I bought click here.
Ingredients to make cake pops:
-Boxed Cake Mix
-Container of Frosting
-Candy Melts
-Sprinkles
Optional: cute basket, styrofoam pieces, and crinkled paper to display the cake pops.
Directions to make the cake pops:
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I think I did a good job for my first try making these but here are a few tips I learned from the process:
1) Don’t add too much frosting. One container is enough. I promise. I added a little extra from a second container because it didn’t seem like they had enough frosting and discovered that I added too much.
2) Make sure you melt the candy melts properly and make sure the bowl isn’t too shallow. I couldn’t easily dip the cake pop in the bowl and didn’t have the candy melted enough so the outside coating of my cake pops is too thick.
3) Once you dip the cake pops in the candy melts and add the sprinkles try to let the candy melt harden on them while they stand up. If you put it back on your cookie sheet upside down the sprinkles sink into the top and they don’t look right.
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By the way, Ladies’ Home Journal is hosting a Personal Essay Contest. Here is more information about the contest: “For the first-ever LHJ Personal Essay Contest, we’re looking for first-person narratives of personal growth — a term you can interpret as broadly as you like. Whether you choose to write about a life lesson you learned the hard way or a challenge you managed (or perhaps failed) to meet, no topic is off-limits. And you could win $3,000 and have your essay published in LHJ. Essays will be judged chiefly on their emotional power, their originality, and the quality of their prose.” To learn more you can read about it here.
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(Disclosure: This project has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias #CBias. All opinions are my own.)
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