End of the year celebration with Cake Pops

So as part of our end of the year celebration we made various types of cake pops. Keep in mind none of us have ever made them before.  I honestly thought it would be super easy...roll the dough, dip in the candy, add some sprinkles, and let them dry.
Here are some pictures of our adventure and the story...

We found a recipe online that gave simple steps for the students to follow.  We even watched a video on making Cake Pops on EHow.com! Very cool that we had a visual of someone else walking us through the steps.  We then broke the students down into 4 groups with each group getting a different flavor of cake. We had chocolate, strawberry, yellow, and then a white with confetti.  We had thought about using a gluten free brownie mix but decided to pass at the last minute (not feeling very brave today...lol).  The first step of making the cake and letting it cool was a breeze.  We've made cakes plenty of times and the students were pros!
Next step after the cake was cool was to crumble it up and add some frosting to help form the balls.  This step is where it got pretty messy, and the adults ended up doing most of the rolling ):  We really try hard to set up activities that the kids can be almost completely independent during the steps, so it was a little disappointing. We still laughed a lot and had fun so that counts for something! Next we stuck a stick in each ball and melted the candies at the same time.  When dipping the cake balls into the candy melts, the balls kept falling off!! As you can see in the picture, we had blue candies to dip the balls..hehe. Anyways, the candy literally just ran right off the cake and made a big blob.  We decided to refrigerate the cake balls for a bit to see if that would help the candy set better.  It did seem to help quite a bit. Unfortunately, this job seemed to be a little to involved for our students, so we dipped and they chose which type of topping they wanted.  At this point, we were a little rushed, otherwise the students probably would've sprinkled the pop themselves. The candy seemed to harden quickly but still wasn't quite like the cake pops I have tasted before. The students were still satisfied and proud of their work. In the end that's what matters!! Better luck next time!

Nellie