My mom and I checked out a marketplace in a nearby city that we had never gone to before. My mom wanted to go because her friends raved about their deli meats and cheeses.

It was a Sunday afternoon, which wasn’t the best time to go and we literally had to take a number and wait before we could be helped at the deli center. They slice and weigh all of the meat for you as you request for it, so it can take quite a while before it’s your turn if there are people in front of you and they order a lot of different meat. As we were waiting for our turn, I grabbed two loaves of some crusty French bread loaves that felt soft and fresh off a nearby shelf. We got black forest ham, roast beef, lean pastrami, and turkey breast deli meats.

I made myself a sandwich today, slicing two pieces of bread from one of the loaves I just mentioned, and used the deli meat we had bought. Slabbed in some mayo, sliced some cheddar cheese in there, and I fried the sandwich in a pan with melted butter. Whoo hoo, yummy indulgence! Usually when you eat a sandwich using packaged meat, the taste can be kind of underwhelming yet extremely salty (helps it stay preserved after all). Eating a sandwich with bread I just sliced up myself and freshly sliced deli meat was a nice change (trust me, I would know from all of the sandwiches I brought to school every single day in the past).

Supposedly deli meat is bad for you in general. Which, I can see that, although I can’t say for sure since I’d have to research further into it. But there could be preservatives, high sodium, and high saturated fat in deli meats (along with unsanitary handling but that can happen with any food you buy outside of home). I guess everyone’s best bet would be to find out from the deli workers about the nutrition of what you’re buying before you actually buy it. But if you’re going to eat deli meat anyway, freshly sliced meat at the deli counter tastes a billion times better than packaged stuff. Makes me want to go back to eating sandwiches again

Have you ever had a cake pop before? I think the first popular chain to sell cake pops would be Starbucks. Here’s one of their cake pops; their cake pops are about $2 a pop. At first I was shocked at how much they cost for such a tiny little snack. It’s about the size of a large lollipop and yet it costs almost as much as a cheap bag of cookies? Well, I finally made cake pops of my own and I will tell you, I don’t think I would make cake pops for anyone unless they were people I cared about or I was paid $2 for each pop because it is labor intensive!!!

It is definitely the fact that I made these for the first time (aka I didn’t have the setup all ready and the prior experience), but even if I became a pro at this, it would still take an X amount of hours! My total time to make these (spanning over two days): about 2 hrs for the first day and 5 hrs for the second day. LOL. The next time I make these (IF there is a next time) I think I could cut it down to 3-4 hours total. Ehhhh.

A cake pop is basically a cake that is crumbled to fine crumbs, mixed with frosting to make a gooey texture, rolled into balls, stuck with lollipop sticks, and dipped into chocolate. It’s far more special than if you just used a mold to bake round cake balls and dipped it into chocolate. The process of making such fine crumbs and combining with frosting makes it very moist, sweet, and a creamy texture. I thought they sounded delicious and absolutely cute so I decided to make these as gifts for my friends this holiday season. Do I want to make it again? I’ll consider it again after I have a good rest and forget about it for a little bit, lol.

So…here is the entire process, with my tips & hints, and all of my screwups.

First, I baked the red velvet cake. After it was done, I crumbled it up the best I could with my hands, but the hardened edges were harder to get at. So after crumbling with my hands, I had to put the entire thing in a food processor to get better results. Next time I will cut the edges of the cake out and throw it in a food processor, and continue to do the rest of the cake with my hands.

After I added a little more than 1/3 of the 12 oz can of cream cheese frosting and mixed it into the cake, I started forming cake balls.

I made sure to put a note on the refrigerated cake balls, informing everyone in my family to not eat them. I left them refrigerated overnight.

This part of the prep work took way longer than I expected. I had to buy a long block of styrofoam since I didn’t have any and then cut it half to make it easier to fit in the fridge and to have two blocks to switch cake pops onto. One batch would be able to sit in the fridge while the other was for freshly made ones. I had to cut the styrofoam which made a flaky mess, of course. Then I wrapped & taped it in saran wrap. Plastic wrap and styrofoam do NOT like each other. I had to put some extra effort into taping the plastic wrap down. >_< Then, I used the lollipop sticks to poke holes into the styrofoam.

I poked holes into the cake balls with the lollipop sticks, dipped the lollipop sticks into melted chocolate, and dipped the sticks back into the indents I had made in the cake balls. After the chocolate hardens, it acts as a glue to hold the stick to the ball.

After all the cake balls had the lollipop sticks in them, it was time to dip them into the melted chocolate. I just got chocolate chips and melted them in the microwave (15-30 sec intervals). My first cake pop wasn’t so bad, but the chocolate was kind of running down the stick. The second cake pop decided to break and stay in the chocolate. The following cake pops broke as well, and I started to panic because I had intended to make all of the cake pops count (aka perfect & not total failures).

After briefly freaking out, I re-evaluated my technique and decided the “dip & twirl” method was not working for me, at ALL. The cake balls were too heavy and too fragile to handle that. I took a plastic fork and broke the two center legs to make a prong. After dipping the cake ball into the chocolate, I used the prong to dump chocolate all over the ball and then pick up the ball between the two legs (tines). I tapped the fork a bit to get out the excess chocolate, gently lifted the cake ball from the fork, and used the fork to gently scrape off the excess chocolate while twirling the cake ball around. I also used the fork to fix any bald spots that didn’t have enough chocolate. This method totally works because I was able to save a lot of cake balls that had already cracked or weren’t very securely stuck to the lollipop stick.

I found that using the previously mentioned method can actually save cracked cake balls – they could stand on their on when stuck on the styrofoam and harden properly. It even saved cake balls that broke apart in my bowl of melted chocolate. I just spooned chocolate all over the broken ball until it was completely covered, and then I transferred it face down (lollipop stick up) onto a sheet of wax paper. When the chocolate hardened, I was able to lift the cake pop with the lollipop stick and it was all in one piece. It wasn’t pretty, but it was somewhat salvaged. Those will be eaten as samples, and I might use them to see how well they freeze & defrost.

The chocolate was super difficult for me to deal with because too much of it stuck to the cake ball and wouldn’t drip off. That made it one huge, ugly lump of chocolate. So I decided to try adding some oil to the chocolate, and also heating up the chocolate for about 10 seconds whenever it started to harden a bit. The oil helped SO much; it was a walk in the park compared to how unwieldy the chocolate was without it. The chocolate was much runnier, making it easier to cover the cake balls, shake off excess, and make a nicer shape. There is one drawback: it will taste like oil. Duh. I don’t know what I expecting, but I think I put a little too much so the chocolate doesn’t taste amazing. It doesn’t taste bad, but it definitely doesn’t taste like pure chocolate anymore. The lesson here is that a tiny bit of oil really does a lot to affect the taste.

I used crushed candy canes as decoration on the chocolate before it hardened.

After all of the cake pops were finally done and cooled off in the fridge, I wrapped them up in pairs. Like I said, I plan to give these out as gifts. They don’t taste as good as they could have been, but these were seriously made with hard labor and love so I hope everyone will still appreciate them.

That was one troublesome project. But hey, at least the ones that turned out right actually look decent!

And honestly, it could have been a whole lot worse. This person’s attempt had me stifling my laughs since it was too early in the morning to wake anyone up with my laughter.

My mom is on vacation in a state located across the country at the moment and she’s gone for a week. I’m living at home with my 30 year old brother and my dad. They do not know how to cook or clean. And even if they did, they wouldn’t do it. Yeah. I try to help out around here by cleaning so my mother won’t go insane, but honestly she always takes care of all the food. Yeah, in a way I’m spoiled because of that. Back at home, studying, doing some chores here & there, and relaxing (albeit the extreme STRESS I’m having is driving me insane!) is not so bad in the grand scheme of things.

Anyways, I’ve got enough groceries to last us almost a week, that is if my cooking turns out okay. Normally my mom would make a huge dish that can sustain us over a few days and then gives us cash for fast food, but this time the cooking is in my hands – not much fast food here this time. It’s great that I’m going to be experimenting with cooking, but not so great that I’m spending time cooking instead of…you know…studying. Aghh!

Used Trader Joe’s Masala Simmer Sauce with chicken and vegetables. I give the sauce a 3 or 4 out of 5 stars. Make for a great, simple meal…although it might be a little too simple for some. I had to cook it for extra long to reduce the excess liquid (tip: don’t add a cup like the directions say), added some sriracha chili sauce, yogurt (adds creaminess), salt, and pepper to kick up the flavor. It goes great with Trader Joe’s Naan bread. That stuff is great.

I’ve been going out for a run with my boyfriend a few times a week. It’s really nice because other than going out occasionally and the chores, I’ve been living a VERY sedentary life ever since I graduated college. So today, I basically cooked for half of the day, went running with the boyfriend, watched a few shows with him, and baked blueberry shortbread. Lol. Ohhh myyy goooodness. I promise I will get better. Maybe I just needed to get it out of my system so I can get into my studying groove? Bleck.