Not dead: Birthday Bento

Yeeeah, school kinda kept me busy for a while there, and then I spent a while recovering.  And class starts again Monday!  But I'm only doing two courses this summer so I should have time for crafting.

But! It was a good friend of mine's birthday last week and I got inspired by Bakerella to make some Cake Pops for her! We were out for supper for her birthday so the reasoning was we'd be too stuffed to actually eat a cake, and that they would be a bit easier to carry with us downtown, too.  You may or may not know that I'm notorious in my family for bad cooking - being what my mom calls "our own Elly May".  Well, these turned out fairly well, though it was a team effort between Bretta and me.  We should do more baking together - she loves baking and I love the crafty decoration bits, so between us we make a good team.

Erica likes sushi so that was how we themed them. We dipped them in chocolate, then the tops in white sprinkles for rice. We used some small candies to simulate the fillings.  In the box we mixed some coloured icing to stand in for wasabi and pickled ginger.

We meant to include chopsticks but forgot them at the last minute!  You can hardly tell in the party photo that she's holding two straws ^^

There are instructions on how to make cake pops on Bakerella's blog. I really do recommend trying them, we were short on time that afternoon because it was the same night as my sister's prom, but we had a lot of fun.

I think if I was making a set of sushi cake pops again, or I guess cake bites since we didn't leave them on the sticks, that I would go about shaping them a bit differently.  I think you might get a better shape (for sushi) by after mixing the cake crumbs with the icing, rolling the 'dough' into logs the size of sushi logs and then chilling those, and then slicing them.  Of course, my experience is with clay so I'm not sure if that would turn out well, but I'd like to try it next time.

They seemed to go over fairly well.