Cake Pop Fail

What cakepops were meant to look like

Always go with your gut.
When a friend first introduced my to cake-pops long ago, I smelled a rat.  Too complicated, I said.  Everyone else in the discussion started throwing verbal tomatoes telling me how foolproof they were.  Well, that was until cake-pops met this fool.  They are - as I always suspected - diabolical.  With the sweet, creamy face of a cherub but the soul of, well, of the opposite of a cherub.
I went ahead and tried them anyway, mostly as a political statement against Starbucks (who is now selling absolutely delightful cakepops ... or so I hear).
Making the cake was obviously no problem, my friend Betty who lives in my pantry always comes through for me.
Crumbling the cake and mixing it with a tub of frosting (see friend Betty above) was also no problem.
Balling, chilling and sticking a lollipop stick in  the pops ... ditto, ditto, and ditto.

Then it came time to dip the pops into the melted candy.  I want to pause here and ask if anyone has seen Bakerella's video where she demonstrates this process.  It is a thing of beauty.  Her movements are graceful and subtle.  With a deft flick of her wrist, she manages to submerge the pop, swirl it a bit and that excess candy obediently drips right off back into the bowl.  Don't believe me?  Check it out.

This didn't happen with me.  In fact the first pop is somewhere in candy melt purgatory, it just plopped right off the stick never to be seen again.  Search and rescue spoons did what they could, but ...
I tried again, this time pushing the stick in further to the pop and dipping into the candy veeeeery sloooooowly to catch it before the point of no return.  It made it about 1/3 of the way in before it was clear he was going the way of his friend.  I pulled back just in time and - I should've taken a picture - it looked just like a punk-rock (the melts were pink) Friar Tuck.

Can you picture it?

I persevered and finished a small batch.  I had already mentally committed to making a little bouquet of them for the teachers at my kids' school and wasn't about to let some cakes on a stick beat me.  The bright side is that of course, you really can't go wrong with the taste - cake, frosting, and candy melts!  And I think maybe the sprinkles distracted the eye from the peekaboo cake nudity going on beneath the pink.  What do you think?

It's the thought (and taste) that counts ... the label reads: May God reward you...