Monday, May 21, 2012


Hello! Hopefully everyone is enjoying the hot spring days! Perfect weather for parks, and bike rides, picnics, and soon pools and beach! Memorial Day is coming up; hopefully everyone can have a three day weekend! Father’s Day is June 17th! Summer is around the corner and will be here before we know it!  4th of July, and so many more fun things coming up!

 I’m also looking forward to a couple of week’s vacation in July! My sister and brother in-law will be coming in for vacation, and to do us the honor of baptizing our son Neo Lamar.  It’s always exciting to plan a celebration, but especially one as important as our son’s baptisms. I can’t wait!

Our son Leo just finished his first preschool course and has a couple of weeks off until they begin again in June. He has learned to ride his bike, and has made new friends; he can say his numbers, alphabet, and colors in English and Spanish! He is doing great so far! He loves his school and his teachers. He is anxious to go back! We had a last-day family picnic a few days ago to get the kids together one last time before the older kids go to kindergarten, and so the kids could bring in their parents and siblings to mingle. All the parents brought in a side salad to share with the hot dogs and sandwiches for lunch. I made a potato and egg salad fresh that morning, but I also spent the night before making the parents and kids a special treat. I made Cake Pops!

I took a trip to Michaels Art and Crafts store for supplies and wrapping materials.  I want to add that I LOVE THAT STORE! It’s craft HEAVEN in there! I could easily spend hours and days browsing the isles! My goal is to have an office and/or craft room and fill it with EVERYTHING I need or want!  lol… ok back to reality, for now my plastic storage drawers will do.

Anyways, I made white and milk chocolate covered cake pops and I decorated them in primary and secondary colors for preschool, and then I made some milk chocolate covered with pink sprinkles for the moms.  Someone asked if they were hard or messy to make, and my answer to that was that working with the melted chocolate you’re more than likely to have a little mess. Overall, not bad though! You do have to dip the pop in melted chocolate, but you can let the excess chocolate run off before decorating. Sprinkles are the easiest way to decorate, but there are more elaborate ways to decorate them. I would say the most time consuming part of my decorating was that I added the star sprinkles by hand, one-by-one. I wanted them to be either all one, or a certain theme of colors, or to match the sprinkles… the stars were also bigger and thicker than regular sprinkles; I couldn’t just tip the bottle over the cake pops. I took pictures of the process and will explain the steps I took below, enjoy!
So, after spending too much time at Michaels, and then going out for dinner with the family, it was a little too late to go home and start baking and cooling cake sheets to make the cake balls. So my little shortcut, "cheat" is to use Dunkin Donuts' Munchkins! But you can use any "donut holes" though. I realized the best and easiest ones to use were the glazed white, or glazed chocolate donuts. The powdered and jelly filled donut holes have the powdered sugar covering that makes the melted chocolate hard to stick, and it falls into the melted chocolate and can make it bumpy or clumpy instead of having a smooth chocolate coat.
Once I had all the donut holes laid out over wax paper I dipped one end of the popsicles stick into the melted chocolate and then inserted it in the middle of the donut hole. I did this for all the donuts, then I put them in the fridge to cool the chocolate. This is to help stick the donut to the stick so it's easier to dip and decorate. Otherwise, the cake ball/donut will just fall into the chocolate, or fall off when you're trying to eat it.
While they were in the fridge cooling, I used nacho trays to lay out my sprinkles color coordinated to the star sprinkles so it was easier to match since the stars were all in one bottle. I also melted the chocolate melts.
I dipped the donuts in the white and milk chocolate and let the excess run off before adding sprinkles. I decorated them, then I placed them on a green, florist foam circle I used as a stand to dry. Then I placed all of the decorated pops in the fridge to cool and harden the chocolate completely before wrapping them.
Once the pops were hardened and the sprinkles were on without falling I wrapped then individually and tied them off with colored ribbon. I decorated a box with the same ribbon to place the pops in for presentation.
I made 40 donut pops that night! I went to bed at about 1am after wrapping all the pops, placing them in the box and back in the fridge for the night, then cleaned up! It was all worth it the next day! They were delicious and everyone enjoyed them! Some people thought they were store-bought, and were surprised when I told them I had made them myself.


If you have read my previous posts, and are back to follow up on my blog, I thank you very much for your continued support. If this is the first time you visit my blog I also thank you and I hope you have liked it so far! I welcome everyone to continue visiting my blog and comment on any of my posts. If there is anything in particular you would like to know, or hear more about please let me know! I would be more than happy to research for you!
If there is anything I can do to help with any upcoming event planning please contact me on this blog or at adynunezevents@hotmail.com. Everyone have a safe week!

Thanks,

Ady Nuñez

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