Last week, I showed you my amazingly talented friend's Angry Birds cake pops.  Let this post serve as a cautionary tale of when cake pops go rogue.

Lesson 1: Prep is very easy. Make the box cake. Cool it and then crumble it to smithereens. Add about 3/4 of the tub of pre-made frosting to the crumbs, and then mold into small self-contained shapes. Toss them in the fridge to set. Before you start dunking pops in candy, make sure you have a place to stick them. Otherwise you'll have 2 in your hands and then be stuck wondering what to do.

Lesson 2: Melt the candy well and definitely in 30-second increments. Use something narrow and deep, like a tall coffee cup. The wrist action will give a smooth all around coating.

Lesson 3: Do not make the shapes too big or let the melt get too thick. The cake pop gets naturally bigger once it is dunked in candy melt. Thus, if they start  too big, they will split and splat. If the candy melt is too thick, it looks like an acne pop. The picture at left shows the morgue for dismembered cake pops.

Lesson 4: Use icing and food coloring like paint. We tried Wilton's Edible Ink Pens. Do not waste your money. They don't work on candy melts, and worse yet, scratch the candy surface.

Use a very, very fine paint brush and add food coloring to the leftover frosting. I was feeling nearly homicidal after the frustration of the ink pens. Notice the scratchy, weak Jason mask at the left, below. But it was easy to give him a makeover using a brush and food-colored icing.

Lesson 5: It's fun. 
Despite the non-functioning ink pens, my daughter and I spent a great afternoon making these. Until we figured out the icing trick, we made the best of the icky-ink pens with "emoti-pops" --> :P, XD and T_T and the riddle pop: What does the equation the square root of -1 is greater than 3u mean?

Eat Well. Be Well.