Call me Zeitgeist-girl

I am so *very* up to the minute! I've been reading loads of baking blogs and saw something I fancied trying. As we get to weather for days out and picnics -  actually, we're in weather to stay in and avoid the torrential rain but hope springs eternal - the idea of easy to pack, hard to damage portions of cake seem just the very thing. So here we go, push up cake pops.

Crap name, must actually call it something decent.

  Anyway, I started with a tray of cake, done in two colours. I had been tempted by disposable icing bags for use in my workshops and hadn't used them myself, so I took the opportunity to have a go with them as well. I tinted the icing two shade and if I were making a bigger batch I might use 3 different colours.

Don't they look fun? They pass the first test, which is that my kids are clamouring for them. The pass the second test, which is that Himself thinks they look great. Obviously the important thing is that they taste great.  I haven't tried an assembled one yet, because I'm about to have my dinner, but I've been cheekily scoffing the trimmings and I can vouch for their deliciousness.

After that, I must do a costing. If the unit cost if more than any sane person would pay I have to give up on a project. This happens quite a lot. Decent ingredients are really rather expensive.

Then it's longevity I look at.  I will make some and store them in the cupboard, fridge and freezer and see what the various shelf lives are. In general, a fridge KILLS cake, and it drives me bananas when people store it there.  Fridges dry cake out.  However, as these are totally enclosed they ought to be fine. I think.  Hence the testing.

If all of these are positive, and to be frank I usually go back and tweak the method about a million times, I can finally look at selling them.

I think they'd be lovely for both the milkshake bar and the soft play centre. The down side is that there is a lot of plastic packaging. It can be put through the dishwasher and re-used, and is fully recyclable but it does go against the grain to have such a heavily packaged, non-biodegradable product.

Anyway, that's the latest experiment. What do you think?