Look at me! I'm making cake pops! Wait a minute - oh SH**

I had one of the most epic mom fails of all time today.

It all started with the best of intentions and could've had the worst possible outcomes.

Tomorrow is D's eighth birthday.  

A couple of years ago he was officially diagnosed with a peanut allergy.  He never liked peanuts or anything with peanut butter in it; he said it made a mouth "spicy," so we just avoided them just to be sure.  Now we carry around an epipen.  God forbid.

Back to my mom fail.  It's hard to find birthday treats that are safe for peanut allergies.  Everything is either processed in a facility that also processes peanuts or has trace amounts of peanuts in it.  We used to be more lax about the "processed in a facility that also processes peanuts" label until Ocean Spray had their major recall of greek yogurt covered craisins that had been accidentally interspersed with yogurt covered peanuts.  Now we avoid those labels too.  So in my search for allergy friendly birthday treats I found an easy tutorial for making cake pops so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Bought the ingredients a couple days ago, cake, icing and chocolate candy melts in a lovely green and blue.  I even took lots of pictures because I bought I would write a post about making them! 

Here's how I started: baked a cake from a box and crumbled it all up.

Crumbled up the baked cake.

Put in 1/3 cup frosting.

Mixed it all together and rolled into little balls.

Everything is going great, this isn't as hard as I thought.

 

Melted some of the candy melts to secure the lollipop sticks in the cake balls.

This is when I hit my road bump.  Halfway into inserting the chocolate covered lollipop sticks I thought to myself: hmmm, I really should double check this.  And then I found this:

WHAT!!!

Did I really do this?!?

How did I buy these?  Not even "processed in a facility that processes peanuts," but "MAY CONTAIN TRACE AMOUNTS OF PEANUTS"

So I just spent two hours making birthday treats for my soon to be eight year old that could potentially kill him.  

Are they still taking applications for Mother of the Year?  I might be a shoo in.

So I brought him up and explained what I had done, and he was bummed but kept reassuring me that it's ok, he thinks I am the best mom ever!  That just made the self-induced guilt trip that much worse.  If he had eaten hem he probably would've been ok but there's always that chance of an anaphylactic reaction.  Happy Birthday D!  Here's some cake pops I made ya, let me know if your throat starts swelling. 

So I tried taking a few and replacing he use of the chocolate with the cake icing:

  Nailed it.

Not effective, not pretty, but he will get to eat these. 

I finished the rest with the possibly-peanut-containing chocolate melts for the other kiddos.  

 Some didn't quite work out.

I'm also taking him to the farmers market to get a special allergy friendly great from my amazingly talented friend Melissa from Pippin's Gluten Free Pastries tomorrow!  

I think I'll leave the cake pop making to my other super talented friend Jenny!  

But seriously, when is the Mother of the Year voting done?  I got this one in the bag.

Until next time!