Poppin Off About Cake Pops

When cake pops first started to be a thing, I remember thinking that they were cute but underwhelming.   If you read my post about chocolate chip cookies (here), then you will know that I like my desserts like I like my men...big and rich (well, not really true about the men, but defintiely true about the cookies.  Anywho...)    Why on earth would I want to eat a tablespoon of cake, covered in waxy white chocolate?  The concept was unappealing from every angle.

Then, a couple of weeks back, I was out to lunch, running errands and I got a hankerin for a cup of coffee.  I stopped in to a Starbucks near my office and while waiting on line, had a crazy yen for something sweet.  I peered into the display case and in the bottom righthand corner, I spotted a white cakepop with yellow stripes.  The color alone was springy and eyecatching and when I read the label, I knew I had to have it.  It was a Lemon Cake Pop.  I felt like this might be a little better than your average cake pop and might taste less like a crayon than other cake pops that I had tried in the past.

After waiting an inordinate amount of time for the shit-show trio of baristas behind the counter to take care of the one person in front of me,  I stepped up and ordered an iced latte and a lemon cake pop.  Filled with anticipation for my treat, I waited patiently while the twelve year old serving me searched for the cake pop intermittently between gossiping with his co-worker.  Really Sparky, if you can't wait until break time to shit-talk your coworker, then perhaps you should start a YouTube drama channel and leave the service industry in your barely post-pubescent wake.  Finally, after fiddling, futzing and spilling the tea to his friend, he emerged to tell me that they didn't have anymore lemon cake pops.  Damn it!  Here I was, ready to open my heart to a cake pop and there were none left.  My youthful server tilted his head and a lock of pomaded hair fell in front of his eye.  He flipped it back with a toss, looked toward the ceiling and with an empty, Bieber-esque gaze said, "we only have the birthday cake pop".

At this point, I was on the verge of returning back to work late, so I hastily agreed to the birthday cake pop, knowing full well that I was going to hate it more than I hate brussel sprouts. I grabbed my coffee and pop and sprinted out the door to my car.  I pulled the pink coated pop from the bag that the Beibs dropped it into and I examined it closely before taking a bite.  It was a pretty, soft pink hue and sprayed with a light smattering of white non-pariells and though not as Spring-like as the lemon cake pop, it did give me some seasonal feels.

I hastily snuck a bite of the pop and I swear my eyes pinballed around in my head.  It was delicious.  The coating did not taste like it was straight out of the Crayola 64 box and the center, while sweet, was not unbearably so. I held up from pulling out of the parking spot to allow myself the additional two bites that it took to finish the cake pop. If not for the confines of my dreaded nine to five, I would have run back in and purchased two more, but I was late and needed to get on the move.

Today is  April 19th (actually the 20th since it's 2 AM EST) and I am typing this with splotches of hot pink dyed white chocolate spread across my face like some kind of twisted, Willy Wonka acne and a completed display of cake pops, poised and ready for Easter lunch.  Ok, so I made the pops in a state of inebriation brought on by Sangria, Rioja and Brunello (don't judge. Like you've never drunk baked).  And, they are not the most symetrical of pops, but damn if they aren't tasty and double damn if they aren't hella cute.  See for yourself:

Best wishes for a festive holiday weekend!

The Quaker Oats Guy Can Bite Me

Filed under: No good deed goes unpunished...

Two weeks ago I got an e-mail about a corporate fund raiser event.  The company I work for has an admirable track record for supporting worthy causes and there is always a run or a walk or a gift basket raffle that you can participate in and/or donate to.  Me?  I'm more often a donor rather than a runner because,  sweating next to your co-workers? Ew.  But this particular email looked like something that I could actually contribute to in more than just a financial capacity.  The company was holding a bake sale!  Now we're talking!

Immediately I looked away from my work and began imagining what grandiose delights I could whip up for public consumption.  Pinterest and Instagram were being flooded with pastel colored goodies for Easter and Spring and there were more rainbow sprinkles and glitter than a dressing room at DragCon.  Besotted with more ideas than I could ever execute, I tucked a few favorite ideas away and decided that I would choose my treat closer to the day of the sale.

Fast-forward to shopping day on the weekend before the sale and my thoughts turned back to the my potential baked good.  As I started to imagine how I would bake and package some of the treats in the little black baking book in my head, the sexier options started to fall away. The treat needed to be sturdy, single serving, easy to transport (anything with icing was out) and it needed to have mass appeal.  The goal here was to raise money for charity, not to bake a hazelnut dacquoise masterpiece, dusted with icing sugar and garnished with a brown butter coconut tuille (which hello, you had me at brown butter).  So what did I decide on? A chocolate chip cookie. I know, I know not interesting and there would be so many at the sale that they could potentially go un-touched.  Nevertheless, I remained un-deterred and thought about how I might differentiate.

I know that when I reach for a chocolate chip cookie, I have certain criteria.  First off, I like a cookie that's the size of a dinner plate.  If it doesn't look like I am biting into a planet, then why bother?  The cookie needs to be brown around the edges and bottom and soft (but not raw) in the middle and the taste of the butter and chocolate need to make my knees buckle.  That is the cookie that I set out to make; big, brown, buttery and dripping with rich chocolate.

The packaging needed consideration as well, because these people would be porting treats back to their desks and that thought of an exposed cookie sitting on a napkin set my germophobia alight to the tune of a five alarm blaze.  I had purchased beautiful glassine bags at the Paper Source a while back, anticipating just such an occasion and decided that I would put them into play.  I purchased gold stickers and a teal colored Sharpie to write on them and had my packaging all set. Simple, chic and most of all, hygienic.

This morning, I awoke with the intent of organizing my bagged and tagged cookies for transport and display.  Because my dog is a 70 lb behemoth with 3 foot long legs (no lie, they are as long as baseball bats), I had constructed a wall of boxes and cartons to block him from getting at the cookies that were laid out on the counter.  I began  to pack all the boxes of mac and cheese and tall cartons of chicken stock back into my pantry.  The last item I picked up was a carton of steel cut oats, you know the kind with the Barbara Bush look-alike wearing a Boy George hat?  Well, I guess I did not grab it carefully and the top came off and the oats went FLYING. I emphasize the word "flying" because they had to have wings to have reached the distant places in my kitchen and den that they landed.  I now know the true definition of "far and wide".  I spent 30 minutes vacuuming and moving furniture to get all the little oats that were clearly poised and ready for this jailbreak.

Luckily, the little oat accident did not impact my cookies and they made it to the bake sale and sold briskly, which is what is really important.  Not the fact that I trashed my kitchen or the fact that I went with a basic cookie.  But really, f#@k a steel cut oat.