Beaucoup Orders

A couple days ago, I volunteered to donate 100 cake pops to a group of 4H kids who were having a bake sale at our local street fair. I didn't think it would be that big a deal because I've made 100 in just a couple hours before, no problem.

What I failed to realize was that I was also making some for school. I take the pops to school (college) and sell them so I can buy supplies for the bigger events coming up, one of which will finish paying my boyfriend's son's way to Australia for two weeks with People to People.

Thankfully, I had already baked and prepared most of the cake pop dough. I had to bake two cakes in different flavors, but that was minor compared to the actual rolling, sticking, dipping, and wrapping event to follow.

I began a Conversational French class about 2 weeks ago, just because I wanted to refresh what I took in high school. That class is on Wednesday nights. Because of that class, I didn't get home until nearly 9PM because I had to stop and pick up a few supplies. Needless to say, I didn't get very much done last night.  I had about 40 cake pops remaining from my school trips, so I was able to sort those into the 4H box and was partway complete. That helped a lot. Then, the work began. I was able to roll out the batch of Butter Pecan, and get the Mocha completed.

I recently discovered that if I lightly coat the pops with a granulated sugar based topping, the chocolate will harden almost like a candy coating. The chocolate then stays nice and thick instead of thinning out to a paper thin coating. I like it thicker. However, coating each pop is time consuming, and in one hour, I had completed 19 cake pops.

That's about 81 cake pops short from my previous attempt. So, I went to bed. 1 AM

I woke up at about 7:30 this morning. I always take about half an hour to an hour to wake up, but I tried to keep it to half an hour this morning. I got to work about 8AM. By nine, I had completed a batch of German chocolate. About 40 pops. I sat down and ate breakfast because I was now frustrated. About fifteen minutes later, I got back to it. I doubled my speed, as best I could, and was able to finish another batch by 11. Then I ran out of wrappers.
I rolled the rest of my previously prepared dough and about 11:30, realized I had a cheesecake order due today that I hadn't even started. Thankfully, it's for an instructor, and she will be able to get it in the morning, when she really needs it. I put together the cheesecake and ran to the store for more wrappers and sticks.

Cake pops, although they are a great success, tend to distract me from everything else. At about 1, I realized there was no way I was going to finish by 2, when I needed to leave for work. So, I stayed home and worked on them until about 4:30. I still had about 30 that I needed to wrap, 20 to the 4H kids, the remainder for the school box.

I set them aside, hopped in the shower to wash away the day's grime, and tossed the unwrapped pops into a bag and took off for the street fair. I finished wrapping the 20 pops when I got to the fair, and the silly little things were selling as they were being set out.

I learned a couple things from today.

1. Never donate 100 cake pops unless they are already made
2. Never donate 100 cake pops and plan to make another 100 cake pops when you have a time limit.
3. ALWAYS prepare the cake pop dough beforehand. It saves a ton of time.

All in all, I made over 200 cake pops today.

** Pictures will be posted soon.** Especially the mocha pops.