Teacher Appreciation Projects

For those of you who have kids in school, you know that this week was teacher appreciation week. My oldest is in Kindergarten so we had to step up our game a little more this year. Not that I didn't want to shower her teacher in gifts because she is just flat out A-MAZING, but we also wanted to give a little something to her art teacher, music teacher, technology teacher, and PE teacher to say "THANK YOU" for all that you do. If you add that up that makes 5 teachers! So I wanted to do something creative, inexpensive and yummy (because frankly, who doesn't like a good sweet treat!)

Here is what we decided on:

 Here is how you make them:
1. Make a cake as instructed on the box or from scratch. You want the cake baked through and not 
    gooey. (I used a Pillsbury Traditional Yellow Cake Mix)
2. Let the cake cool completely
3. Use a food processor or a fork and break the cake up into tiny crumbs.

 

4. Mix the cake crumbs with a can of frosting. (You can use any kind of frosting, but I used Pillsbury 

    Creamy Supreme Cream Cheese Frosting)

5. Once mixture is thoroughly mixed put it in the freezer. Leave in there until its nice and firm. (I left 

    it in the freezer for about 1 hour)

6. Once mixture is nice and firm, roll into golf ball sized balls. Place the cake balls on wax paper or 

    tin foil lined on a cookie sheet for easy clean up.

7. Put the cake balls back into the freezer to get them firm again.

The next step is where it gets tricky. Mine started out good, but went downhill fast. Here is what I used: (Melting chocolate, food coloring and pretzel sticks) After learning the hard way that food coloring and chocolate don't mix, take my advice and buy chocolate that is already colored red. Michael's has some red candy melts.

 8. Melt your chocolate in a sauce pan on the stove or in a microwavable bowl in the microwave. It's
     important to melt it slowly to prevent it from burning.
9. Take a pretzel stick, dip it in your chocolate and insert it into the cake balls. Let them set and
    harden up for a few minutes.

10. Dip the cake balls into the melted chocolate, letting the excess chocolate drip off before placing
     back onto the cookie sheet.
11. For the leaves I colored some of my chocolate green and molded it into a leaf shape and placed on the top of the cake pop, but you could also color some icing green and use that for the leaf as well.

And this is what you get:

Our other project for Teacher Appreciation Week was a class project.

We took 2 16x20 canvases and painted the top blue and bottom green. Then added a tree trunk. Then we painted each child's hand and placed their hand prints on the canvases like leaves on the tree.