Day 35: Brunch with Special Friends (Muffins, Breakfast Casserole, and Cake Pops)

Today I had some special friends over for brunch, 4- and 6-year old sisters who were happy to help me get in the Christmas spirit. (Their almost 2-year old brother was over as well but he was more interested in looking at the Christmas decorations than making them.) We made smoothies, ate brunch, made beaded snowflakes, and decorated cake pops. It was a very busy and fun couple of hours.

Our brunch menu consisted of:

• A smoothie bar
• Grandma's Dutch Apple Cheese Muffins
• Coffeecake Muffins

• Breakfast Casserole
• Cake Pops (Various videos are available on youtube.com)

The advantage of most of these dishes was that everything could be made up to a day in advance so I was able to enjoy visiting with friends rather than clanging around in the kitchen while everyone else ate.

Making Cake Pops was an interesting experience. When you watch the videos online, it looks like an easy process but it turns out that this is much more complicated than you would think. The concept is simple. Take a ball of cake (mixed with frosting), put it on a stick and decorate. These treats have been popularized most recently by Angie Dudley, a food blogger known as Bakerella.

Lesson Learned #1: Let me start by saying that, as an adult, I found these balls of cake to be absolutely AWFUL and essentially inedible. Almost all the videos I saw online had you start with a baked cake-mix cake, crumble it up, and mix with about a half container of frosting. Since I had yellow cake mix and vanilla frosting on hand, that is what I used and it turned out very sugary; it was like biting into a solid ball of frosting. I suspect this recipe can be greatly improved by using a better, homemade cake and a light chocolate frosting so that it will be more like eating chocolate candy. (I should note here that the girls loved the cake pops and ate them in two bites.)

Lesson Learned #2: Cavities aside, this is a great activity to do with kids. We used a medium sized scooper and the girls had fun making the cake balls and sticking the sticks in. The balls were somewhat soft and so I followed some online advice and stuck them in the freezer while we ate brunch. Twenty or so minutes later, they had firmed up enough so that we were able to glaze and decorate them. They probably could have stood a little more time in the freezer though as some of the cake pops fell off the sticks (or slid down them).

Lesson Learned #3: I was short on time so I decided to use the canned frosting to glaze the cake pops. Frosting out of the can is too thick for dipping the balls in, so I thinned it down quite a bit with cream. It was great for coating the balls, but as you can see in the photo, the frosting ended up dripping down the sticks and resulted in quite a mess. Next time I will make a warm glaze in a double boiler or fondue pot, something that will harden at room temperature.

Lesson Learned #4: You need something to stick the cake pops in after they have been decorated. Most of the online videos recommend using a block of styrofoam but I didn't have any so I used the cardboard lid of a document box. It worked in a pinch but I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you use styrofoam because the cardboard lid did not provide support for the full length of the stick so they tilted and some fell almost completely over.

Lesson Learned #5: I am not at all into decorating food. I have some cake decorating tips (the kind used to make frosting flowers and fancy shapes) but they are still in the sealed case they came in when I bought them. It turns out the girls were content to have a variety of colors of sugar and didn't miss having other, more elaborate decorating techniques. We poured a little bit of each color sugar into separate bowls and then they either rolled the balls in the sugar or sprinkled it on directly.

Lesson Learned #6: The girls needed a way to take the cake pops home. If the glaze had hardened up properly, I could have wrapped them up with plastic wrap like a lollipop but they were still soft and quite messy. We ended up putting the cake pops, cake ball down, in dixie cups and they each carried their treat out to the car.

The Results

The muffins and breakfast casserole were delicious. These are things I will definitely be making again.

As I mentioned, the girls liked the cake pops but I will be experimenting with the recipes and techniques before I serve these the again.

Ratings

• Difficulty: Most things were Medium
• Time to prepare: Muffins take about 30 minutes; Casserole was 90+ minutes; Cake Pops were 90+ minutes including freezer time.

My Shopping List

The kids have been complaining that there is nothing to eat in the house, meaning we have run out of the convenience food products that they normally eat. I ended up stocking up on cereal, bread, yogurt, and other things in addition to the brunch ingredients, too numerous to list.

The Tally

• The day's tally: $77
• Total this week so far: $77
• Total this month, to date: $142.19