Cake Pops!

Number 17 on our summer fun list was cooking projects. My favorite so far has been cake pops! They were time consuming and really messy, but they were fun to do with the kids and they were able to do almost all of it by themselves.
These are the things we needed:

Cake mix, melting chocolate, frosting, sprinkles, and lollipop sticks.
We started out by making the cake:

When it was baked and cooled completely, I divided it up into 3 bowls and each kids got to crumble up their cake.

Then we added frosting to each bowl and mixed it in:

We put all of the cake/frosting mixture into one bowl and put it in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

What did we do with the extra frosting?

Someone helped get rid of it. ;0)
When the cake was cold, they rolled it into balls.

This was a little messy. =)

We put the balls into cupcake pans lined with baking cups. (that way when we added the melting chocolate it wasn't as messy to clean up.) Then we dipped the lollipop sticks into the melting chocolate and stuck them into the balls.

We put them into the fridge to set the sticks.

When they were set, we put them into the melting chocolate and rolled them in sprinkles!

Don't they look yummy!!

Zach decided he wanted to try a different kind of chocolate:

It was yummy too!

The kids' verdict?

Delicious!

The only problem we had was that the kids made their balls too big. Some of them fell apart when we were trying to add the chocolate and sprinkles. I think they got tired of making the balls, and they just got bigger & bigger until they were out of cake. =) But they were still good and they didn't mind eating "broken" ones.
While I am blogging about things we have checked off of our list, I keep forgetting to blog about number 23: summer reading club. We finished it several weeks ago, and the kids got their prizes from the library; new books!!!

Zach read all of his books on his own (of course) and Riley read almost all of his books on his own. Yeah!! All three kids liked getting to pick out new books as their prize for being good readers!!