It's always a scary time!

School holidays. The perfect time to take your children out to see a movie at the cinemas. Well, it was a cold, Wintery Sunday night, the end of yet another busy weekend, and we went and saw Monsters University.

I've recently wanted to practice making coloured chocolate for cake pops (well, that's my excuse anyway), and what better time to practice than when you're about to go out and see a movie, right!

So I made some Monsters University cake pops!

... Okay, that's a lie. I wanted to make these,

but all I managed to make were cake flops :(

It just so happens that when you colour white chocolate, you need special colours that aren't water based (annoyingly)... I thought I had the system right when I made the Smurf head cake pops, but turns out I had this false sense of confidence that was quite clearly shattered tonight.

Mike Wazowski.

He had fondant for his eye, and tic tacs for his horns, but he lacked the shine and smoothness that he has on screen that he would have had if the chocolate didn't turn dodgy...

What... What did you do to my face?

With this big chocolate fail, I didn't even bother adding a smile to his head, or trying it again to make 'Sully'. So we went out to the movies without thematic cake pops to eat...

And it was still a great movie even without cake pops - we all loved it :) Even Jonathan, who spent the second half of the movie climbing over the chairs and practicing being stealthy...

It then (in the middle of the night, as it usually does) occurred to me that perhaps I used the wrong chocolate?! With the Smurf heads, I remembered that I used white chocolate melts... And with these ones - I used white baking chocolate. There's got to be a difference.

Well, there's clearly only one way to test this theory ;)

So after cleaning up the mess that these first attempt produced, I was ready for take two, aaaaand ACTION.

N.B. When melting chocolate - do NOT use bowls that heat up too much and burn your fingers when you take them out of the microwave... I learnt this from, uh,  a friend of a friend of mine. It hurts! And the chocolate goes weird because of it. Make sure you use a microwave-safe bowl, or heck - even a Pyrex measuring cup.

This time, the melts worked fine (ish), but with the colour, it was still a little bit chunky... The result s then, were almost the same, but I was able to make a few more cake pops... And because it takes ages for white chocolate to set, I forgot to come back after a few minutes to put the tic tac horns on... Oops!

This version of Mike Wazowski, though he has a mouth, looks even scarier (and not in the funny animated movie kind of way) than the first version! :(

AAAHHHHH!! You're just making it worse!!

I was  flattered that my children could still make out who it was supposed to be... Actually, that's another lie. I wasn't flattered at all... What else is round, green, has one eye, two horns, and is related to a movie we all just went and saw? They are lovely kids, though, and always tell me that the things that I make look amazing and beautiful, and that they taste delicious...

Hmm. Perhaps that's where my false sense of confidence stems from?

Either way, I think I might just stick with making plain white cake pops like these ones for now...