When life hands you lemons…Make lemonade! Or so the saying goes.

How optimistic!

In this case life handed me cake crumbs. The lesson of turning a disaster into an asset is so important, in the kitchen and in life. We learn the most from our failures, I think. My most recent kitchen flop started out innocently enough…I was on a marathon baking spree for our upcoming annual dessert party extravaganza. I added a new cake to the mix last year; a snickerdoodle cake with brown sugar cinnamon buttercream frosting which was a PERFECT combination of my favorite cookie,(snickerdoodles), and my favorite food group (buttercream frosting). The cake was tall and, honestly, a little intimidating to eat so I brilliantly decided to make it as mini-cupcakes for this year’s party. Unfortunate lesson: no amount of greasing the pans was going to make this recipe work as mini-cupcakes. I ended up with eight dozen cupcakes worth of cake crumbs after prying them out of the muffin tins. Ugh.

I was about to toss them out to the birds when my children declared them too tasty to throw away and started brainstorming possible re-uses. Trifle was the first suggestion, but that didn’t incorporate the buttercream frosting and needed at least three compatible elements to work – besides, I already had a classic English trifle on the menu. Hmmmm...

And then, in a light bulb moment, I thought of “cake pops”. And the angels sang. I would get to keep my buttercream as the glue that holds the cake into balls, and coating the whole thing with white chocolate seemed like a complementary flavor pairing…not sure about the décor on them, or whether to serve them on sticks or just in a bowl or arranged in a tower…or even if they will work at all! I’ve never attempted cake pops before, but clearly, it is a ‘thing’ so it must be possible….”how hard can it be?” (famous last words!). I’m off to buy white chocolate. I’ll let you know how it turns out!