When In Doubt Spending Your First Married Easter in Texas and Not With Family in LA...

Spice it up!

I raise my glass to you, Coiner of the Cliche, "It's the simple things in life!" Think about it. The first bath in the clean tub after scrubbing your bathroom for over an hour. The way your pedicured toes make you feel like a woman. Stocking stuffers. The tugging at your heart when you leave the grocery and see puppies being sold/given away in the parking log. Seeing the puppies again the next day.

This Easter weekend, while not quite "simple," quite simply requested that my husband and I cherish the aspect of life deemed (according to dictionary.com) "uncomplicated, effortless, undemanding" While our weekend activities proved none of these, we spent time together exploring kitchen adventures, thus reaching that uncomplicated and undemanding depths of ourselves that are often hushed and reprimanded during the busy-ness that is working and succeeding in today's world.

Traditional Easter weekend in LA: A Good Friday crawfish boil spent with one side of the family, a Holy Saturday crawfish boil with the other, and a go-to-Easter-mass-with-one-parent-visit-quickly-with-the-other-parent-and attend a barbecue with my husband's family Easter Sunday .
This year we decided to stay in Sugar Land and set our own traditions, and in doubts of our decision to stay away from all we've known, added sugar, Italian seasoning, crawfish boil, and certainly SALT to our menus while stretching our culinary muscles!

While I will post recipes, pictures, and stories associated with the entire weekend, my favorite kichen jaunt followed Bakerella's road to deliciousness.

One classic white cake mix; vanilla icing; and several melting white, pink and yellow chocolate packages later, I jumped in.


Saturday afternoon held cake-baking, icing-mixing, egg-shape forming, and chocolate-dipping, only to be followed by Sunday's decorating frenzy. Creating the pops can be tricky, and I suggest instilling extra confidence in the stability of your pops early in the process as during this first attempt, some of mine fell off the sticks, thus my creative take on the dessert.

After making the cake pops,
To decorate:

• Shape the cake balls into an egg shape.
• Dip in candy coating color of your choice.
• Let sit in the styrofoam block until dry.
• When dry, use a small paint brush to paint on a thin layer of corn syrup in a line around the egg. Do one line at a time. Right after you paint on the syrup, sprinkle on one of the sanding colors until all of the corn syrup is covered. Use a bowl sprinkle over.
  
• Repeat with varying designs and colors.
• You could probably also do this with the melted candy color, but this time I was experimenting and tried the corn syrup.
• For the confetti sprinkles, either dab a little bit of the candy color with your toothpick and glue on the sprinkle shapes or use a little bit of the corn syrup to act as the glue. The corn syrup will take a little longer to dry.
• Dry completely.
  

The number one rule in all things home improvement, secure the right tool for the job. Ditto for cooking and baking.
Unless you are heavily reliant on glasses and aren't reading with them currently, you've noticed the difference in my pops and my posted Bakerella picture. Without the appropriate sanding colors or confetti sprinkles (not housed at my local grocery or Michael's) and apparently the ability to smoothly coat my chocolate, I ran into some roadblocks (presentation, NOT taste, included). I managed this round but hope to improve in the future. This weekend's "Play of the Game" lies in the styrofoam block purchase, a clutch move suggested by Bakerella, in holding cake pops while drying and decorating. Genius.
I'm fairly certain that the sprinkes I purchased weren't fit for the job, but I adapted and although, not "effortless" in any sense of the word--bake the cake, mix with icing, freeze, dip in coating, freeze, decorate, and dry-- found a simplicity, challenge, and satisfaction, and a way to spice up, or perhaps sweeten, the treats of Easter weekend, those not purchased on our local grocery's candy aisle.