Baking Hearts

I had planned on leisurely baking my valentine's treats this weekend but the weekend got away from me. Instead of baking I saw 2 movies (The Grey and The Vow - the latter I enjoyed much more but also cried a lot more), attended a Valentine's dessert concert, a jewelry party, and ate at PF Changs where my fortune was looking pretty good:

Then it looked less good when my brother got the same one. LAME.

Anyways, it was a fun weekend but my procrastination led to me baking like a mad woman last night. I rushed home from work and started on the whoopie pies. The pan came with recipes for both chocolate and vanilla cake. I made the chocolate first… they did not turn out so well.

This was the first time I'd ever made cake from scratch. The recipe says to stir it until it is just mixed, but I don't think I stirred it enough. The batter was difficult to get into the whoopie molds and I ended up with a lot of ugly peaks in my cakes.

Since I only have 1 whoopie pie pan I had to bake it in two batches. I stirred the batter more before the second batch and they turned out much better. I ended up cutting the top half of the cakes so the ugly side was in the middle. The filling was very easy to make, a little sticky to fill - but I just used the back of a spoon to smooth out the sides. Then I decorated with sprinkles!!

Learning from my mistakes, the vanilla cakes turned out much better. I dyed it pink (yay!) and made sure to mix the batter well.

The batter smoothed out much better for these.

mmmm. Woopie Pie filling.

Next I moved on to the Pie Pops. I love the pre-rolled pie crust Pillsbury makes. It's just so easy to use! One circle made 7 hearts. I placed them on the cookie sheet, placed a rod on top and some canned cherry pie filling. Four cherries were a little too much - the juice squeezed out the sides, so I went down to 3 cherries per pop. 

Using the end of one of the rods, I pressed the edges together. I brushed on some egg whites and baked them. At this point it was close to midnight, so I only made 7. I wanted to get more pictures of the step-by-step process, but my phone had died and of course I left the charger at work. I didn't mind too much because I still have my Sony Cyber-shot camera - but when I turned it on this is what I saw:

Looks like it's time for a new camera!!

I'll still have to play around with the pie pops - 4 of the 7 turned out really well. The rod either fell out or broke through the crust on the other 3. But broken or whole, they all tasted pretty good!

Happy Valentine's Day!!