A Valentine Girl's Night

This angle makes our cake pops look awesome.

It was Girl's Night on Valentine's Day; a lively evening of pizza, cake pops, 90's music and Dutch Blitz :). Us CCCO girls trickled into Amy's house between 4:30 to 7:00 pm and set about making a mess in her kitchen. Her house is wonderfully set up for group cooking endeavors. 

Our resident baker, Amy, made the pizza dough before hand. 

In honour of Valentine's day, we decided to shape each pizza into a heart.

A little attention to detail and we even sliced our salami slices into little hearts. (That salami sure had a lot of kick, Michelle!) 

Piping hot, fresh from the oven!

Throughout, we were alternately singing, lipsynching and dancing to love songs from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s - and discovered that we have all heard these songs sung in Chinese while growing up. Mandarin and Cantonese speaking pop singers really like English slow songs :P.

For dessert, we made cake pops. I learned last night that the original way of making cake pops is to bake a cake, crumble it, mix the crumbs with icing and then form it into balls. I must admit that sounds very dense and not that appealing to me. Several months ago, my mom found this cake pop maker in the clearance section of Loblaws and could not resist buying it. We took it out to use for the first time yesterday and were delighted to find that it's really easy to use and works very well. For a quick recipe, we just used cake mix and club soda.

So easy - fresh out of the box and just plug and go!

This was the tester batch. We weren't sure how much batter to put into each well and so they turned out a little pale and uneven. 

The second batch was a vast improvement.

A pair of chopsticks makes transferring these things onto a cooling rack hassle-free. These cake balls taste best when fresh out of the maker with no icing. (Although decorating was fun...)

This was a great idea for a cake pop holder but I think we will need to weigh it down more next time.  It held for most of the evening and only tipped over once. 

We didn't have any chocolate melts so we had to experiment a bit to create a dip with chocolate chips.

Dipping it, unfortunately, was not very successful.

I tried to use the thicker consistency of the icing to my advantage.

A bit of sculpting...

He's not sure what to think...

But in the end, he's happy to be here :)

As you can see from our first picture, our other designs were far more abstract. They look neat but were a little too sweet.

To Amy, Tracy, Emily, Michelle, Elysia, and my sister, thanks for an awesome evening! As always, we need to do this more often!