Fun foods

I had a battalion commander one time who was a bit of a stickler for time. He was always 20 minutes early to everything. He expected things to be turned in early, and he saw on-time as late. He would often be heard saying "Better never than late".

I'm not in the army anymore... and have four kids. I am very happy to make it places on time. I try to plan to be places early, but somehow it never quite works out... usually, somebody forgot to go to the bathroom... but that's a whole other story.

What does this have to do with anything? I'm feeling a bit guilty for just getting around to posting some fun things we made for Valentine's Day... but I'm going with the saying "Better late than never" for this one :-)

The first thing I made was for Girl Scouts. Do you follow Bakerella? If you don't, you should! Super fun.

You start by making a cake -- I used a boxed red velvet cake. Bake it like normal and let it cool. Once it cools, tear it up. Literally. Take two forks and crumble it in a big bowl. Once it's crumbled, add in a can of frosting (Bakerella uses a whole can, but I usually only need about 2/3 of a can for it to stick together). I use a 1oz cookie scooper to keep the amounts uniform. Roll each scoop into your hand until they are balls. Looks like this...



But I also have a silicone ice shaper (is that what they are called?) in heart shapes. I got a pack of two at Target for $2.50!



Shape then stick a lollipop stick in! I put mine in the refrigerator (but the freezer will work too depending on how much time you have) and start melting the chocolate.

Once the chocolate is right and the cake sticks are chilled, dip them!



And put them in a styrofoam sheet (so they will stand up to dry).



I made ball ones too!



I'm not sure how Bakerella gets hers so smooth. I've tried this numerous times and have yet to get them exactly round or smooth... I'll keep practicing, though!

I decorated these up a little with some white chocolate. The heart ones looked better than they photographed. The glare from the kitchen light throws off the look, but they really were cute!






I ran out of sticks so I also made some plain ol' cake balls too.




Next, I made some cookies for Bones's music class friends. I've never used royal icing before. I must admit there was a bit of a learning curve. But things that start with this:



and this:



can't be bad, right!

So, simple sugar cookies in the shape of hearts was where I started. I let them cool while I made the royal icing. I didn't have any 'extra' powdered sugar, so I just stuck with two colors -- white and red. Good for Valentine's, right?

Once everything was cool and ready to go, I drew the borders on all of the cookies. Fine. At that point, I thought I would work fast enough to work with six cookies at a time. Mistake. When you move onto the next step (flooding the cookie with icing), you kind of have to work one cookie at a time. Especially if you are going to put another color on top. If you are working one at a time, the top color kind of sinks into the lower, base color. If you are working six at a time, the top color just sits on top of the base -- which would be fine, if that's what I wanted to do. It isn't though, so six of the cookies became my "learning cookies". Here's an example of a learning cookie:



See how the letters sort of sit on top? And the heart... forget about it! Horrible. I thought I could still flood the red into the heart, but it didn't work. So... I had to zigzag the red in. Horrible {said with head down}.

Once I understood, I got better... and the cookies looked better.





I also wrote things on the cookies like "Music Rocks" and "I <3 Music". They turned out cute.