My nephew Braden is amazing. When he was a toddler, he was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder which is on the Autism Spectrum. He’s now eight, and my sister has remained unrelenting in finding the tools that will help him function better among typical kids – be it a therapy, a sport, a playgroup, or working with his school counselor and teachers to make sure he gets the help he needs. She’s awesome and Braden is brilliant – he just made the honor roll but as with many autistic children, his social skills are not the same of a typical child. Lots of autistic kids will play by themselves and some are non-communicative at all. We’re lucky with Braden - he talks pretty normally but wouldn’t necessarily go play with other kids. His teacher this year has set up a book club once a week where kids can stay in from recess and talk about a book they are reading to help Braden with his social skills. Right now they are reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. My lovely sister has been making treats for this event each week. And when I suggested that the Wimpy Kid would make a totally cute and easy cakepop she said that she thought the kids would love it if I made cakepops. So much for suggesting that she do it. So I set to thinking about what I would need. I figured I could use half a jelly bean for his nose and just pipe on his eyes and smile with black frosting but I didn’t think the frosting would work as his hair and indeed – it didn’t.
I finally settled on some black string licorice cut into quarter inch pieces.
I like this one the best:
I showed the best one to Braden only for him to proclaim that he wanted cupcakes. Oy. But by this point I had already baked and crumbled a cake for cakepops. So not to waste the opportunity to cover crumbs with white chocolate I made the cake pops without sticks. I used a toothpick to dunk the balls into the melted chocolate and then another to push it off the first toothpick and onto a parchment lined pan. Before it hardened I stuck half a white jelly bean on the front and three slivers of precut string licorice on the top as hair. When I hardened I used black frosting to pipe on eyes, ears and a smile J Since Braden wanted cupcakes, I decided to use these adorable little Wimpy Kids as toppers. I whipped up a batch of chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and piped on a generous pile of frosting – I find giving third graders a lot of sugar mid-day is always a good idea when you don’t have any kids. Then I popped the little Wimpy Kid heads right into the center and went from cute cupcakes to adorable overload!
I swear I will never get tired of people saying "Wow!" when they see something I made. Especially kids!
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