The accidental rough snowman theme

I had no intention of working with a snowman theme this year.

Not only did I get an accidental snowman theme…. I got a theme of snowmen that really didn’t go very well.

First up: snowmen ornaments

Ok… so these looked really cool.. so I decided to try it.

First off, I couldn’t find just a plain blue ornament with no weird textures or anything. So we ended up with silver.

Then… for whatever odd reason, nobody seemed to have the plain white washable poster paint. Every other color… just no white. I’m not nuts enough to give kiddo acrylic yet.

But while I was wandering around in the craft section looking for googly eyes, and I saw some very snow-ish glitter. So I grabbed a bottle of elmers… and we went for glitter instead of paint. (by the way, googly eyes are awesome! they up the cute factor in kids crafts greatly)

It was the 4th ornament or so before we finally got one looking decent. You would not think getting a kid to both spread fingers and curl upwards would be that difficult… but we had a time of it.

The glitter actually did turn out pretty. However, markers wouldn’t work to make the faces. So we had to turn to the eyes and beads… which meant we had to do two snowmen, let them completely dry so the beads wouldn’t slide when bumped around doing the others, then turn and do 2 more, and wait again, and then turn and do the last one. Very much a pain.

Then the arms looked too skinny done by the small sharpie. So kiddo wanted to use pipe cleaner. Which didn’t work well with so many arms in such a small area. And so we ended up with multiple lines of a larger marker put together to make it wider.

So we started with 10, lost 4 in the glue stages, lost another to glitter dripping issues making it look weird, and another in the arm process. So 4 survived the ordeal.

They do look cute. It just ended up being a rougher process than I’d expected.

Second round: Cake pops

This post a while back reminded me of these cake pops I’d seen around but never tried. So I decided to use Christmas as a reason to make some.

I was originally just going to make them with sprinkles, and had bought some strawberry cake to be reddish inside. But then I decided to just leave them white and make them snowballs… so I bought a white cake mix next trip to the store.

Somewhere in this process, I got the idea to turn them into snowmen by putting 3 per stick, and adding some chocolate chips for eyes and pretzel sticks for arms.

And this might have worked… had I been using real sticks instead of the coffee stirrer things I usually use for things needing sticks.

Actually, crumbling up the cake into crumbs was kinda fun… cool texture to smoosh your hands in… and a bit messy when frosting was added, but still fun to play with.

After they froze to firm up a bit, they really seemed pretty bland. The white cake mix might not have been the best choice.

However, about then is when Patti told me my issue with extract making bark turn weird was probably because I was using too much extract. So.. since I actually had a spare package left over from something else in case it went wrong, I decided to add a bit of peppermint to their coating to add some flavor. I think I actually went too far on the other side and added too little, as you could barely taste it, but it gave it a small hint of flavoring anyway. (and without the weird texture)

But it was downhill from there. This was a mess. The sticks started folding over… the balls all started falling apart.. the bark wouldn’t spread very even and kept wanting to just fill in between the 3 making them look like one lumpy shape.

I eventually just left them all on the wax paper and dumped spoonfuls of bark on them to call them snowballs. But then when they thawed a bit more it became pretty clear they were only going to hold together if they were covered on the bottom side as well, so I had to flip them and remelt and cover the bottom… which made a really goofy shape.

I was very tempted to put eyes on them and call them decapitated snowman heads by this point.. but I behaved.. lol

The texture turned out pretty nice, but after all the mess, I wasn’t actually a big fan of them. Very rich and overly sweet. Maybe using cool whip or something (since it gets frozen anyway) instead of the frosting would make it less overwhelmingly so, but really, about half of one of these was enough.

Third round: NOT spiders

I had a bag of mini marshmallows that were being used for something else, that were sitting next to some pretzel sticks that were meant for the cake pop arms.

Kiddo noticed them, and asked to make spiders. You see, several halloweens ago, we made spiders using full sized marshmallows and pretzels for legs.

So after some convincing, we compromised to making snowmen… so I got a bag of the big marshmallows, and some frosting to stick them together.

And we still ended up with some spiders… and some kinda wonky looking snowmen.

Ah well. Sometimes things go that way. Most of the other stuff turned out well… my snowmen just didn’t want to cooperate this year.