Mini Cherry Pies

I am a sucker for Homemade gifts! I love getting them and I LOVE to make them for people. Every year I try to come up with something new to make for my grandparents for Christmas. They typically have everything material that they want, so rather than just buy them something new, I like to go the goodie route.

Let's talk about these cherry pies!

My grandpa is a diabetic who loves cherry pie. He absolutley refuses to eat the sugar free pie, and can only eat the regular stuff a little at a time. In the past, I've made him Cherry Pie Pops from Bakerella's website, so this time around, I wanted to do something a little different.

A friend of mine told me about a website she had stumbled on: NotMartha.com and they had posted these adorable little pies, baked in 4 oz. glass jars! That's right BAKED IN THE JAR! No mess and easy to transport! So I couldn't pass it up!
I looked all over Omaha for the jars, but it was already after the canning season and they were hard to find. I actually found the jars at a Walmart down in Tennessee over Thanksgiving while visiting my parents. Now, for the pie part, I cheated like crazy! I bought a refrigerated pie crust and cut it to size, and I bought canned cherry filling. Next time, I'll try from scratch, but these didn't turn out half bad for cheating ;)

After they cooled, I put the lids on and tied each one with a cute Christmas goodie ribbon, put three of the jars in a basket with some Hot cocoa mix and tied the basket witha Homemade By Me ribbon and off we went! The grandparents LOVED them!

Christmas cookies!

So this year, I decided to try something new. I decided to jump onto the Royal Icing bandwagon! And I gotta tell ya, I don't think I'll ever jump back off! I LOVE working with Royal Icing and I don't know why I waited so long to try it out!

It just makes everything so much easier to decorate and to transport!

I made a basic sugar cookie and then followed the recipe and steps for the icing found on fellow nestie Annie's blogsite: http://www.annies-eats.com
Super easy recipe and tasty too!

It was a long process for decorating, but honestly, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Now that I've gotten the hang of it, I have so many ideas I want to try out on cookies! Look for those to come in the new year!

Tree makeover

Not that they needed it, but for something a little different, I gave my christmas trees a bit of a makeover and I almost think I like these better than the previous trees! Plus they didn't crack near as bad! What do you think?

Thumpity Thump Thump, Thumpity Thump Thump...

Look at Frosty Go!

These are my cute versions of Frosty the Snowman! While I would love to take credit for the idea of them, I just can't. Credit goes to: Leslie Salazar DeMedicis. I found her picture of them on the Bakerella fan site on FB. I did make a few changes to make them my own. She had used jelly beans for the nose, where I used an orange rainbow chip and she had used red candy melt for the hats and I used green on mine.

All in all, I thought she had a great idea, and everyone that I have made them for have said that this one is their favorite! So thanks Leslie for the great idea!

Frosty is just a plain pop dipped in white. I attached a chocolate candy wafer to the head right after I dipped it, then spooned some green candy melt onto the wafer and attached a Rolo candy to that upside down. Touched it off with decorative sprinkles, a small rainbow chip candy nose and used my Americolor pen for the eyes and mouth!

Santa needs a helper!

Sorry it has taken me so long to get some of my Christmas posts up and running! Christmas was a very busy time for me, not only for my own baking, but for many large orders of cake pops for other companies and clients! I'd like to give a huge THANK YOU to all who ordered during the holiday and look forward to working with all of you in the new year!

Now, back to Santa's lil helper!

Where would Santa be without his....ELVES! I figured, hey, if i can make Santa, surely I can make an elf!

So here he is with pointed ears and all! I absolutely adore him! And he was sooo easy to make! I made skin tone candy melt again, much like I did for Santa, and then dipped a left-over cake ball into it. Let that sit to dry and then dipped the top half of him in the green, let that dry, then dipped that in red, leaving a little green, then once that dried, you guess it...dipped it back in the green again and topped it with white candy for the puff on the top of a hat!

Then, using the skin tone candy melt that was hardening just a bit, I put a nose on him and some pointy ears! Then I used my Americolor edible pen and drew on eyes, freckles and a mouth! He is so neat and he turned out exactly like I wanted him to!

Here Comes...

SANTA CLAUS!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, so I know I've said this in the past about various other cake pops but....

This one HAS to be my all-time FAVORITE cake pop ever!

Not only because I am a huge fan of Santa and Christmas, but because he is just soooooo flipping cute! I never in my wildest dreams thought he would come out as cute as he did.

I was working last night on some cake pops for another couple of mug arrangements for the same client from the below post, and this time she has a snowman mug and a Santa mug. I thought, ok, I can do another snowman and I could do a Santa hat and that would be good, but then I thought, why not try out an actual Santa?

So I mixed up some white candy melt with a chocolate candy wafer for the skin tone, dipped the cake pop in that and let it dry, then I dipped the top of his head into the red candy melt and let it dry. I then used the end of a lollipop stick to create his beard and hair in the back, used left over skin tone color for his nose, used a toothpick for his mustache, and then glopped a little more red candy melt on top. I used a white sixlet for the ball on top and used a black candy writer for his eyes!

Sounds like a lot of work, but isn't he worth it???? I think so! ;)

Gift baskets and Cake Pop Cups

Still keeping up with the Christmas Spirit, I recently had 2 new orders for gift sets! YAY! I love doing gift baskets and gift sets! So much fun!

The client for the gift sets bought some really cute Christmas mugs and asked if I could arrange 6 cake pops in each one. Of course I said I could do that! So, since each cup had a snowman on the outside of it, I decided to make a little snowman cake pop for each cup! 2 girls with snowflake bows and a little guy with a striped scarf! The client was happily surprised!

Here's an above shot, looking down on the mugs. You can see their cute bows better at this angle!

Now this next one, my husband actually asked if he could order cake pops for a business gathering he was going to. Silly man, like I was going to take his money (considering his money is my money too! lol).

I went ahead and made him 2 dozen to take with him, mixing it up with reindeer, snowmen/snowgirls, christmas trees and santa hats. I arranged them in a basket I happened to have around the house and then tied it off with an adorable ribbon I picked up at Hallmark. The ribbon says "Handmade Just for You!" Perfect for Christmas goodie baskets!

They all loved them and he came back with an empty basket! Yay!

UPDATE!

For those of you who would like to get an order in for any Christmas or Holiday festivities, please have your order in by Dec. 18th. I will fulfill orders up until the 20th of December and then will be taking a break from the 21st until the 28th as I will have some of my own Christmas baking to do and will have my family in town during the holiday. Thank you so much for all of your continued support and for your orders! Have a very safe and Merry Christmas!

Who's ready for CHRISTMAS!!!

I am sooo excited for Christmas! It is my absolute favorite holiday ever! I love all the goodies that people make, including myself! I love making gifts for my family and friends and I just love the spirit of the holiday.

So, to get in the mood for Christmas...Here are some fun cake pops!!!!

How awesome are these??

Festive ornaments!

Reindeer and Santa's hat. The idea of Santa's hat came from Bakerella's website last year. You can see hers and other ideas at www.Bakerella.com

Christmas trees and a cute lil snowman! Next time I make the trees, I need a bigger star on top! I have a few other ideas for some festive cake pops and they will be posted soon ;)

Can you tell me how to get....

....how to get to SESAME STREET!!!

For the second auction piece, I chose to go with a kid friendly theme, and what better theme to go with than Sesame Street?!?!?

Sesame Street celebrated their 40th anniversary this past week, so in honor of them, here are a few cake pop idols!

You've got Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and Elmo!!!!!!

These three are my favorite out of the whole bunch! Especially Oscar!

The orange one is supposed to be Elmo's friend Zoe, but she just wasn't turning out the way I wanted her. :( And of course, what's Sesame Street without Big Bird??

Bert and Ernie, yeah, they didn't turn out as well either...but you get the point right?? lol.

The gangs all here!!!

Prairie Life Fitness Breast Cancer Awareness

Okay, so my next few posts are going to be about an event that I am donating cake pops for. Prairie Life Fitness center is hosting a breast cancer awareness event that includes a wine and cheese banquet and an auction. I was asked to make a few ideas for the auction involving my cake pops and I was also asked to donate 10 centerpieces of cake pops to the wine and cheese banquet. So, for auction ideas, I came up with a Thanksgiving basket since Thanksgiving is right around the corner.

Here you have Pilgrims!

And here are Native Americans!

And my version of the first Thanksgiving, complete with candy corns and Turkey and pumpkins :)

Transformers

Oh my goodness! Have you ever seen an actual transformer? Those guys have pointed parts and crazy pieces all over! Thankfully, there is a Transformer shield that is pretty easy to do!

I had a request from 3 of my co-workers within days of each other, wanting to know if I've ever thought about doing Transformers. So I thought, why not? I looked up online to try and find the easiest one and came across a shield from the cover of the Transformers movie.

I used red velvet cake mix with cream cheese frosting and used chocolate chips for the pointed part on the top. They were a hit, with the exception of one 5 year old. His mom relayed the story to me the next day:

I asked her how the cake pops went over and she exclaimed how cool they were and how everyone loved them...all except her 5 year old son. So of course, I asked why? Did he not like the flavor or was he unsure of the cake/frosting on the inside. She said he absolutley refused to eat it b/c the red velvet on the inside looked like BRAINS! His words were: I am NOT eating their brains!

I have been waiting for that reaction from a kid! I have made the red velvet so many times for kid parties and I'm surprised it's taken this long to get that reaction! Classic! :)

Pokemon!

I will say that these particular cake pops were very difficult for me! I know absolutley nothing at all about pokemon, but I never back down from a challenge without trying first ;)

A good friend of mine asked for Pokemon pops b/c her nephew's birthday theme was Pokemon. I of course said, sure, no problem! Then I sat back down and said, whoa, problem...I know NOTHING about these guys. So after much research and googling, I picked a few from the top 10 list, and of course you have to have Pikachu! I made these little guys out of Oreos and cream cheese b/c one of the nephews is highly allergic to egg products. These were such a neat little addition to their party and good for all to eat!

New Email Address

I don't really know why it's taken me this long to do this, but.......

I created a new email account just for my cake pop business!!! Luckily the address I wanted was still available! You can now place orders through: sweetbites25@hotmail.com ! By having this seperate email account, it will make the process of me receiving your orders alot easier! Yay!! So in the future, please use this new email address, or this website to place your order!!! Thanks so much to all of you!!

November Order Deadline!

Just a quick note to all my awesome customers!
Because I am going out of town November 24th thru the 29th, I will not be fulfilling any orders after the 22nd. I will be back up and running December 1st for those of you who are looking for Christmas pops! Oh, I will still be checking my email and taking orders for December when I'm gone so feel free to let me know!

I will also be featuring a special in December! If you choose to go with the flavor of the month, Gingerbread cake with cream cheese frosting, you will receive 6 bonus pops with your order!
I will also be featuring holiday "Pop" baskets in the month of December! If you are interested in any of these ideas or just want to know more in general about my cake pops, shoot me an email at sweetbites25@hotmail.com !

P.S.-Watch in the next week or so for Christmas pops...pictures will be posted soon :)

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble!

Yay for Turkey Pops! I think my favorite part of November and Thanksgiving is all the yummy desserts you can make! My office is planning a "Wine & Cheese" party, which means that everyone brings something, whether it be an appetizer, dessert, cheese or wine, so I thought these would be a perfect way to get everyone in the mood for the upcoming holiday!

I'd like to say that he was easy to make, but he was actually VERY time consuming. Will I do these again, OF COURSE! ;) So worth it! His body is a red velvet cake ball covered in chocolate candy melt. His head is half of a chocolate crisp ball w/white baby sprinks for his eyes, a yellow mini chip for his beak and an upside down heart sprink for his waddle. His feet are orange flower sprinks. Bakerella used pretzels on hers, but I like the look of a fat birdie w/tiny legs lol. And of course, his feathers are candy corns!

This is looking down on the top of the basket of pops I made for the get-together. I did about 15 turkeys, a few candy corn pops, a few plain pops but candy corn colors and a few brown pops with leaf sprinks. I can't wait until they see these at the party!

Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty...

Recently I was contacted to do Hello Kitty and Monsters Inc pops for the daughter of one of my agents. I got super excited! I've wanted to do a Hello Kitty ever since I first saw it on Bakerella's website (www.bakerella.com).

The agent asked me to make red velvet w/cream cheese frosting. I attached 2 chocolate chips to the top of the cake ball and then dipped the whole thing in white candy melt. For the bow, I used 2 red heart shaped sprinkles and a red mini chocolate chip, and for her nose, a yellow mini choc. chip. For her eyes and wiskers, some people use the edible pens, but they don't seem to work for me, so I used black candy melt and it looks better to me actually. :) So cute, and so fun!

Coming soon....

It is officially November...where did the time go???????

Some of the orders I have coming up are: Hello Kitty, Pokemon, possibly Transformer shields and then pops for Breast Cancer Awareness towards the end of the month. Also thrown in the mix, I want to do some Turkey pops! Also, be looking for Pumpkin Pie pops to show up on here as well as many other things related to the Thanksgiving holiday!

Candy Corn anyone?

A few weeks ago I did the Monster Inc pops for a friend of mine. Well, one of her friends at the party liked them so much, she contacted me for her own daughter's birthday party.

The theme? Candy Corn! How cute is that? She was doing little gift baskets for each child to take home that was based around Candy Corns, so I did white cake/vanilla frosting plain pops in the colors of candy corn w/candy corn colors for sprinkles on top.

And because I wanted to try it out, I thought it would be cute to make a candy corn pop for the birthday girl as well!

It turned out exactly how I wanted it! I received an email from the mom today letting me know that everyone LOVED them. :) That always makes me so happy to hear if people enjoyed them!

So remember that, lol! If you order from me, send me either pics or reports of people enjoying them and I will post them on here for all to see!

Boss' Day

For Boss' Day this year, the Secretary from my old Elementary school, contacted me to see if I could do some cute pops for the Principal. She thought maybe something with A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 would be cute. So I thought long and hard about it and was originally going to do like wooden blocks, but then I thought, when I think of teachers, I think of Apples!

I shaped the cake pops into a round apple shape, my mom helped me out by shaping tootsie rolls into stems and then she, myself and my cousin Denae dipped them into red candy melt, attached the stem and then when they dried, i wrote the A,B,C's and 1,2,3's on them. On a few of them I also put this cute little worm and made it look like it was coming out of the apple!

They were a hit!

Halloween/Disney Bucket

One of my Sorority Sisters had contacted me back in October about doing a cute little bucket for a friend of hers that was coming to visit. She decided she wanted some of them to be Halloween, and the rest of them to be Disney characters.

I have not done that many Disney characters, but I don't think they turned out that bad...

Minnie and her bow were a bit of a challenge. I used tootsie rolls, smashed out flat in circles for her and Mickey's ears, and then I used left over candy melt on a piece of wax paper to shape her bow.

I think in the future I will have to use something a bit stiffer for the ears because they kept wanting to lean or tip over. But I think Mickey turned out pretty cute!

All in all, there were 2 pumpkins, 2 ghosts, a mummy, a tombstone, and Frankie, shown below. And for Disney characters there were Mickey and Minnie, Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc, and Nemo.

Sorry some of the pics are pretty blurry, not sure why my camera has been acting up lately...might be time to get a new one, eh?

Monster's Inc.

My friend Keri asked me if I could do pops for her little boy's birthday party.

We contemplated a few options and she finally suggested Monster's Inc! So here is Mike and Sully!

Halloween Pops!

Ooo,
I am getting in the mood for HALLOWEEN!!!!

No Halloween is complete without a Mummy, a Wicked Witch and a happy Vampire!

You've got the creepy eyeball, a couple of pumpkins, a cracked skull...and a cute lil' ghost too!

The gang's all here, except for my little spider friend...he'll be along soon!

You've Heard of Army Wives...

But have you heard of Army Pops???

My client has Army Wives Bunco night at her place and of course wanted to know if I could make something to go with the theme. So I thought to myself, well, I could just make black and gold pops since those are the army colors, but where the fun in that, let alone the challenge in that? So...Camouflage pops were born! I dipped each pop in chocolate candy melt, and then drizzled light green, dark green and light brown candy melt on top, then tapped the stick and twirled upside down to make them run together a little bit!
I think they do our troops proud!
To all the troops out there, Thank you for your service and God Bless You.

Come On Get Happy!

Along with the Husker pops I made for my mom, I also made these adorable little smiley faces!

My mom LOVES happy faces, so when I suprised her with these, she was super excited!
I love my mom :)

Are You Ready For Some Football???

My mom, dad and sister visted this past weekend from Tennessee and my mom has been bugging me to make some of my yummy pops for her to take back with her...
So in the spirit of the game we had this past weekend, I decided to make Husker pops to send back with her!

Gotta represent right? lol.
These were made out of yellow cake/chocolate frosting cake balls, dipped in red candy melt and using a toothpic, i drew on the state of Nebraska and the words!

I'll bet they LOVED these in Tennessee...lol.

How cute are these little footballs??? I had to add these onto this post even though I actually made these for a baby shower a few weeks ago!

Rubber Ducky, You're the One!

Baby Shower time yet again!

This time the mommy asked for Rubber Duckies and Footballs. (I'll post those later.)

I used an M&M for the beak and white sprinkles and my edible pen for the eyes.These pictures don't do the lil guy justice!