How to Fail at Making Cake Pops {or Bee-Pops vs. the Zom-Bees}

When my son was getting ready to turn three, he told me about three months in advance that he wanted a bee party. In researching bee parties, I saw several version of bee cake pops that looked adorable. Things like these cute bee pops from Bakerella:

They didn't look too hard so I gathered my supplies and invited my friend Niina over to help.

Supplies

• Cake Pop Pan
• Cake mix & ingredients for cake
• Yellow Candy Melts - two bags
• Black writing frosting in tube
• White Candy Melts
• Cake pop / lillipop sticks

How to Fail at Making Cake Pops

Step 1: Don't grease the cake pop pan properly

Our first mis-step happened early on. We prepared our mix and greased the pan with coconut oil but forgot to dust it with flour. This caused most of our first batch cake pops to stick to the pan and therefore rip in half when we separated the pieces to remove them. We got batch 2 just about perfect.

Step 2: Overheat the candy wafers

Once we successfully created round cake balls, we melted our yellow candy wafers. We let them get super thin and runny (can't have clumpy cake pops!). They were so runny, though, that the candy didn't stick to the cake pop and ran off into the pan instead. Of course because the candy was runny, it also didn't provide great "glue" for the white candy melts we'd cut in half to serve as wings:

(did I mention the creepy white eye balls?)

Step 3: Don't dip the sticks in melted candy first

Instead of dipping the end of the lollipop sticks in the candy before putting them in the cake balls, we just popped them in. This, of course, didn't give the cake balls an effective way to stick to the sticks and they were not stable (note the stick starting to protrude from the cake pop pictured above). We tried to compensate for this by inverting the cake pops onto a candy wafer to serve as a stable base. Hey! I'd seen it on Pinterest. Surely it would work:

Step 4: Insist on doing it yourself (after all, you saw it on Pinterest!)

Luckily, this is the one thing I did NOT do. I had given up hope of having bee pops and had walked out of the kitchen with a tray of zom-bees to take photos for my friend, Heather, who runs Craft Fail. While I was gone, Niina figured out some magical way to get the candy to stick to the cake balls and for the bees to not look like they were dying so we DID have some half decent looking bee pops for the party afterall.

But like I said....I have no idea how she pulled it off. Something about letting the candy cool a bit first before dipping and sticking the wings. We also skipped the creepy white eyes and added details with a black frosting bag.

If you really want to make your own cake pops, check out this tutorial over on Master Cake Baker, Ashlee's site: I'm Topsy Turvy. (technically the tute is for angry birds cake pops but you'll at least get the basics)

Because this is really the best I have to offer:

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