Sometimes life has a funny way of teaching us lessons. I learned this in the most unlikely of ways – through cake pops. It’s been a few years since this happened, but it is still a lesson I remember all too well.
A few years back, my kids had been home from school for President’s Day. I thought it would be fun to spend some time with them in the kitchen, making treats and goodies. One thing I thought I decided to try to make with them was cake pops! I had done a lot of reading on how to make them and figured that it sounded simple enough, so why not try it!
The project started out as it should have. I baked my cake according to the package instructions. Once it was cooled, I crumbled it into a bowl and added in 1/2 cup or so of frosting and began to mix it together. I then rolled the cake into circles so that I could have the pops.
As I rolled them, I realized that I probably needed to have a bit more frosting in the cake mix to help them roll a bit easier and to stay together better (they crumbled a bit when I put them onto the pan).
Also see: Easy cake pop recipe
I placed them in the freezer to help make the set and make it easier to frost them. After they were frozen (or so I thought), I mixed 3/4 of a container of frosting with 3/4 a cup of white chocolate chips and melted it to make a glaze.
I started dipping my pops into the mixture. I then learned a few things:
- I did not allow the pops to freeze long enough as they began to break apart.
- I didn’t compress the pops together enough as that was also why the began to crumble.
- I made the pops WAY to large.
- I didn’t have enough frosting mix made.
All in all, they were not horrible, but yet, they still could be better. I was disappointed in how the looked and that the recipe didn’t work as it should have. It was at this moment that I recalled something I noticed every time I drop my daughter off for Karate lessons:
Every Expert was once a Beginner
This was the first time I had ever tried them. I am NOT an expert. I am a beginner and I need to just cut myself some slack. I know what I did wrong and next time, I know that I will do a better job as I’ve learned from my mistakes.
However, the most important lesson came from my kids. Seeing their faces when they looked at the pops and then when they started eating them made it worth it. My kids didn’t care that they were not perfectly shaped. They didn’t care that they were too big. They didn’t care that they fell apart.
What they cared about was that mom took the time to do something fun with them. They cared that they got to have a special treat. Kids don’t expect perfection, and as an adult, I need to remember this more.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Life is filled with more imperfect moments than perfect ones, and we should embrace them each and every day.” quote=”Life is filled with more imperfect moments than perfect ones, and we should embrace them each and every day.” theme=”style5″]
Funny that it took some cake pops for me to really stop and think about all of this.
