St. Patrick's Day

Did you get visitors at your house, too?

Ours turned our oatmeal green.


Sneaky leprechauns!





In addition....

We had our ward St. Patrick's Day party a couple of weeks ago. We were supposed to bring green desserts, but I decided (possibly against my better judgement) to get a little more creative and do something fun, but not totally green.

I've been admiring the work on several creative blogs lately. One thing I'd been wanting to try was Bakerella's cake balls/pops after seeing the idea on my friend Lori's blog. This seemed like a good opportunity to try.


They weren't as fantastic as they've been hyped up to be, or maybe after all my work I was expecting something more than cake and icing encased in candy. Probably the latter. But they were still a tasty, fun treat.

(Here's how I did it and my thoughts on the outcome, if you'd like to know.)
For the leprechauns I used vanilla- and peanut butter-flavored candy melts over chocolate cake/cream cheese frosting cake balls. The peanut butter flavor really overwhelmed the flavor of the cake, rather than complementing it as I had hoped (the candy in general made the whole thing really sweet). Their hats were made with vanilla wafers and Rolos (frozen so they wouldn't melt) dipped in green vanilla candy. Not hard to assemble, but I'm sure Bakerella's would have looked much, much cuter. I used black Wilton decorating gel for the faces, as seen on the Pioneer Woman's cake pops.

The leprechaun pops were more work than I wanted to do again, so the second batch become pots of gold. This time I used chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, and I liked the flavor a little better than the others. These I dipped in dark mint cocoa candy melts, and topped with a squeeze of yellow vanilla candy melts for the gold. Now, these I thought tasted so much better than the overly-sweet peanut-butter-chocolate leprechaun heads. I really liked the dark chocolate mint flavor because it made the whole thing seem less sweet.

I learned from this experience that Fred Meyer only sells Almond Bark at the holidays, as does Albertson's. Wilton candy melts are cheaper at Michael's than JoAnn, but I'll try to wait to do these again until I can get Almond Bark, since I think it will coat better.