The Happy Accident

My daughter's school is having a bake sale today for a special read in event. All week long Kara was asking me to make something for the sale.  It was a pretty busy week, so I didn't really have a lot of time.  Last night at 8:00 p.m.  I finally got around to making something.  When I asked Kara what she would like me to make, she remembered the mini doughnut maker I got for Christmas.  We looked through the instruction book, and decided to make cherry chip doughnut pops  topped with frosting and sprinkles.   That is not how things ended up!

To make cherry chip doughnuts, you needed a cherry chip cake mix and a can of  cherry topping.  I thought I had a cherry chip cake mix, but when I went to get it out realized it was strawberry.  Of course, when Kara heard that, she promptly decided she wanted to use  that instead.  It's a good thing because I was NOT going to go to the grocery store at that late hour to buy a box of cherry chip. We followed the directions and mixed in the cherry pie filling and egg.

This was the first time using the doughnut maker, so I was a little unsure what to expect.  I have used my cake pop maker a few times, so I knew it could be touchy.  Overall it they turned out pretty good, but most did not brown evenly.  Some of the doughnuts were too brown.  Some of them had  overflowed, and had extra dough around the center.   The cake mix made  5 batches of 7, so we had plenty of good ones to chose from.

We picked out the 12 best, but felt they were still too uneven with color to  serve that way. That was when we decided to dip the doughnut pops into candy melts so they would be totally covered  in chocolate.

I dipped the first pop in, and it was an epic fail.  The weight of the candy melt was too heavy and the soft fragile doughnut immediately broke and fell off the stick.  Luckily most of it fell onto a plate.  I was about to give up at this point. It was now about 9:30 p.m. but  then I  had an idea.....

I dipped the stick into the chocolate, and covered only one side while it was laying down on a plate.  I then stuck them in the fridge and freezer, so the candy would quickly harden. Once the candy was set, I covered the other half and added the sprinkles.  They were so much stronger allowing the candy to set in stages.  Because I did it that way though, the pops had a bumpy, uneven texture.

This week as part of reading month, every class in the entire school went on a field trip to see The Lorax movie  Looking at the pops we decided they looked like Truffula trees which was the perfect fit for this weeks theme.  Kara and  didn't set out to make Truffula pops, but were  happy we did.  If I make them again,  next time I would use striped pop sticks  and different colors of candy melt.  Overall waiting to the last minute worked out this time, and I was still able to get to bed before midnight.