– Birthday Treats! #pinterestchallenge

Since the past few days have been all about birthdays, I’ll continue in that vein for my weekly take on Julie’s 52 Weeks of Pinterest Challenge!

(If you haven’t been following along, we’re doing a project/cooking a recipe/visiting a place/etc that we have pinned on Pinterest.com, a HIGHLY addictive virtual bulletin board where you can “pin” or bookmark things you find on the internet.)

This was the first time I’ve had a complete FAIL trying to do a Pinterest project. More on that later…

I went to Twitter last week and asked for easy birthday treat ideas. I wasn’t feeling the pirate cupcakes Henry asked had for, but didn’t know what would be fast and easy to make to take to his class on Friday.

I got several responses back, including this:

Source: hiphiphoorayblog.com via Greta on Pinterest

Another person suggested chocolate-covered marshmallows, which were also in the pin (if you click on it to go to the source).I thought they were super cute and would be easy, so I went with it. There are not, however, directions (which would probably have been helpful).

I got all of the supplies…semi-sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, marshmallows, treat bags and sticks (they had them in the craft/wedding section of Walmart). I already had double-stuffed cookies, so I didn’t need those.

A couple of days before his birthday, I made the marshmallows. They were super easy…melt the chocolate, dip the marshmallows, sprinkle the sprinkles, and lay them on wax paper in the fridge to set.

(While I was making them, I thought that using milk chocolate then sprinkling them with crushed graham crackers would be a fun take on s’mores, but that’s for another day).

The next day (also known as the day before his birthday), I went to town on the Oreos.

I’m not sure what went wrong. I used “Cookie Sticks”, which were a little bigger around than the “Lollipop Sticks” I used for the marshmallows. We had also had the cookies for a while (unopened), so the filling wasn’t as gooey as it probably had been before.

Anyway, about half of the cookies broke when I put them on the stick, but I thought that the chocolate would harden and keep them together.

I melted the white chocolate. When I dipped the cookies, this happened:

The cookies stayed in the chocolate, not on the stick. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE.

I gave up, threw the cookies away in frustration, found a box of Halloween cake mix, and baked it into cupcakes.

Friday morning (his birthday), for the first time ever, I made homemade frosting.

By 2:00, this is what I had to bring to his class:

They turned out yummy, and Henry was excited at least.

I had also found this pin and thought it would be fun:

Source: craftymoods.com via Greta on Pinterest

Of course, I didn’t have helium for the balloons, and I only had six red balloons, but I did it anyway. Because who doesn’t want their kid’s birthday to be special?