How to Chill, Frost, and Eat Your Own Cake Balls

When I saw waterless shampoo for sale at the grocery store this weekend, my first inclination was to realize that we have invented everything. There cannot be anything left to invent. Then I realize that in a few months I’ll probably see an advertisement for a waterless shower system. There is no end in sight.

Because where was the satsuma five years ago? It was quietly resting behind those clementines, which are now advertised on commercial television. And they are truly delicious. You’re so yummy in my tummy, oh my darlin’ clementines.

It’s the little things that rock my world.

Like cake pops.

Just when you thought that cupcakes, mini cupcakes, layer cakes, sheet cakes, tiered cakes, ice cream cakes, and cookie cakes were the best we could do, somebody put on his or her thinking cap and begged the question, “How can we make cake baking exponentially more complicated?” Then the light bulb went off and: cake pops!

My mother-in-law gave me a cake pop kit for my birthday. It contained: a top pan, a bottom pan, two plastic orange pan clips, eighteen white plastic sticks, an instruction book, and three postcard advertisements for turning your jewelry into cash.

Also, the box contained pictures of absolutely adorable, impossible cake pops that my children obviously assumed we would emulate with 100% success.

Here is how to make cake pops (not plagiarized even 1% from the as-seen-on-TV cake pop kit instruction booklet):

1. Make a cake mix by substituting basically every ingredient that is added to the cake mix with something else. You will use up all your regular household baking items.
2. Make a mess by pouring cake batter into tiny round spheres in a pan. This is in addition to the gigantic mess the children have made  adding ingredients and stirring the cake batter creation, but does not include the mess of two small children competitively licking out a mixing bowl.
3. Wash hands. Wash faces. In some cases, wash earlobes and elbows. Or maybe that’s just the cases of my own children, because they are very special about making messes.
4. Debate whether you should cook the cake mix per the instructions on the cake mix box or the cake pop instruction booklet. Never decide. Just spin the oven dial and let the fun begin!
5. Approximately twenty-six-and-a-half minutes later, stick a toothpick in. They’re done.
6. Well, the top half is light colored and the bottom half of each ball is more like a golden brown. Is that how they’re supposed to look? Also, some of them have nipples.
7. Chill your balls in the fridge.
8. Now for the fun part. See all that stuff above? That was a piece of cake compared to the next seventeen hundred steps. Get ready.
9. Melt chocolate in a bowl. Dip the plastic sticks in the boiling lava hot chocolate; insert into cake balls.
10. Wash hands. Wash floor.
11. Chill your balls in the refrigerator for ten minutes.
12. Take out every baking ingredient left in the kitchen and spread on newspapered kitchen table.
13. Allow child to go hog wild using melted candy topping goop, melted chocolate goop, melted caramel goop, assortment of sprinkles, writing icers, marshmallows, etc., to decorate the cake balls.
14. Wash hands. Wash face. Wash neck. Forget it. Just get into the bath tub already.
15. Chill your balls in the fridge again.
16. Tentatively try a cake pop. It immediately falls off the plastic stick and rolls onto the floor (and then my poor cake ball…rolls out of the door).
17. Pick it up and eat it.
18. Eat a half dozen more in similar fashion, as the things are like eating candy-coated donut holes. You pop and you just can’t stop.
19. More washing.
20. Really, you’re not even close to clean yet.
21. You know what? Get back in the bath tub. This is obscene.
22. Cake balls!

If my mother-in-law read this blog, I would swear that she only bought me this cake balls kit to enhance my blog-writing skills. But since she doesn’t, I will say she just got it for me because she loves me.