First attempt: Cake Pops

I have been getting more and more into watching baking shows on Netflix lately. This isn't necessarily a good thing, as it has inspired me to start baking more. I like baking, but I don't do it much, mostly because my husband doesn't like sweets too much,  and I couldn't eat all of it myself, so I stopped baking so much.
I finally picked it back up, though! After watching a few episodes of something that showed cake pops, I decided this would be my reintroduction into baking. Plus, if you have watched the Netflix show Nailed It, you would understand why I believed that I couldn't honestly do any worse than they.

I already had a cherry chip cake mix, so I made that up last night and let it cool. This morning, I went to the store to get more supplies. I bought a package of white candy melts, red sugar sprinkles, sticks, and some frosting (and foam blocks to stick the finished pops in for cooling).
It was actually a lot of fun to make these cake pops! Especially when it came time to utterly destroy the cake. It was just soothing to just crumble it all apart, as well as mixing in the frosting with my hands.

I did have some difficulty with the chocolate for the outer coating. I put a glass bowl with a few candy chips into our microwave and started it up, but almost immediately the microwave protested. It was making odd noises, almost as if there were metal in there. I stopped it right away, and double checked everything. There were no forgotten spoons or anything metal, so I tried it one more time. Once more it did the same thing, so apparently my microwave doesn't like candy melts for some reason. (I was able to use it for something else later with no issue)

Rather than give up, I pulled out a sauce pan and setup a double boiler to melt the chocolate. This seemed to work OK, but I couldn't seem to get the chocolate smooth/thin enough to simply dip the pops. I had to get creative.
Using a spoon, I would cover the pops in chocolate, then using a silicone brush, I smoothed the sides to get rid of the excess chocolate and give a smooth-ish finish. There were some lines along the sides from the silicone "bristles", but I liked the pattern and it didn't take away from anything, so I kept up this method to do them all.

Second, I hadn't quite decided how I wanted to apply the red sugar, so I started coating the whole thing, then after several, I started just coating the sides and top. I liked the look of that much better.
Once I started getting low on chocolate, I just put a little on the top of the pop, with a small bit on the sides, then just dipped the top in the sugar.
The way I did the sugar covered a lot of the chocolate, and covered up a lot of problems. I used more sugar than I originally intended, but at the same time, it makes everything look better. 

Here is the end result (ignore the wonky ones on the right where I ran out of chocolate)

It was a great learning experience, and I wouldn't be opposed to making more at another time.
I have learned:

• one cake mix will give you about 3 dozen pops (less are pictured above because I ate some, of course). 
• you should have 2 packages of candy melts (and some crisco or other thinning agent to add)
• there should be plenty of left-over frosting for other uses (I only used about 1/3 of a package)

I am going to take the left 2 blocks of pops to work tomorrow to share amongst my co-workers. Overall, I call this attempt a success!