Ladybug Cake Pops

I was asked to make some ladybugs for a little girls birthday party. I saw a lot of cute ideas for making these in the blogospere. It was really hard to decide what technique to use for the little dots. Some people used mini chocolate chips and sprinkles but I couldn't find the mini chips. Also my customer wanted some pink and purple ladybugs too so using chocolate chips wasn't going to work!

I finally settled on using royal icing for the fine details including the eyes. This technique worked well for everything BUT the eyes. By the time I transported them to the customer they had fallen off. So I had huge lipped eyeless bugs! Thankfully she still liked them and I hope that not all of the eyes fell off. Next time I'll use those Wilton googly eyes or try my hand at making them per a tutorial found.

i also had a lot of trouble getting the pink candy to melt and thin out properly. These pink ones had to be coated twice and as a result ended up twice as big as their red counterparts. It seems like every time I make cake pops one of my candy melt colors refused to cooperate!

to make photographing them more fun I also made some flowers. They were really easy to make as I just squeezed the cake mixture through a flower shaped cookie cutter.

I then coated it in the melts, added royal icing details and some blinging sprinkles.

I also made some of the bugs upright and others belly down per customer request. Can't decided which are my favorite. I know I definitely prefer the red bugs because they just came out better but I think the stick placement really doesn't affect my opinion on cuteness.

I have to apologized for the really really sucky photography. I know it's usually bad but this time it's exceptionally bad! mid way through making them all my light disappeared in the form of a wicked thunderstorm. Thankfully by the evening it was gone as I was anxious to go see some Independence Day fireworks.

I should be happy I have a camera at all. It's looking pretty iffy wrapped up in tape. I'm not sure why I am so hard on my cameras. Makes me second guess saving up for a nice DSLR. What if I break it!? I would just be devastated if I broke an $800 camera (and embarrassed!).