Cake balls and Valentine's Day

For a while now, I have been wanting to make cake balls but never really had a reason to, until now! Our youth group puts on a Valentine's Banquet every year to raise money for camp and it's probably the most fun event we have during the year. The way they raise money is through dinner and an auction. Church members are asked to donate nice gift baskets, and then we auction them off! So you can bet I made some yummy cake balls to put into the baskets I donated.

This is me making the cake mix, I finally got to use my new apron!

After the cake cools, you divide the cake into 4 pieces, and start the crumbling process.

Here I am crumbling the cake, it felt so weird "ruining" a perfectly good cake!

After you mix in the icing (sorry no pic of that), you start the rolling process.
This was pretty messy!

While the cake balls were in the fridge chilling, I melted the yummy candy coatings!

And here is the finished product! My very first cake ball!

I then put the cake balls in a container, and assembled the gift baskets.
Isn't that stuffed animal adorable?
Oh, to be a kid again :)

The finished gift baskets!
I think they turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself!

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Now onto Valentine's Day stuff! Last week was like "valentine's week" for me. We never really go all out for V-day, but for some reason last week I kept getting gift after gift after gift! It started out with a vacuum. Yes. A vacuum. I was beyond fed up with our vacuum, which was the same vacuum I used in all my years of college! (yuck!) So I asked Matt if I could get a new vacuum for my v-day gift. He laughed, and said ok. So he went out that day and bought the coolest vacuum i've ever seen. It makes vacuuming fun! I was one happy girl, with some super clean carpet! Then the weatherman predicted ice and snow, and said he would be shocked if kids were to go to school the next day. Since my office closes when schools close for snow days, we got excited about another snow day. So the day before all the ice hit, Matt went and bought one of my favorite movies, Wall-E, as a surprise gift when I came home from work. When I walked in the door and saw the movie propped up on the counter, I was so excited and he said "Here is your early valentine's gift! It's also so we have a movie to watch during our snow day." Isn't he great?! I of course didn't get any sleep that night because I was so anxious to know if we were actually going to get a snow day. Which we did, and I loved watching my movie :)

Then 2 days later, while I was at work, I got ANOTHER surprise! 2 pink balloons, 1 white ballon, all tied to a wonderful cup from Pinkberry! If you don't know what Pinkberry is, shame on you! It's the best frozen yogurt ever MADE! It totally beats out those other pop-up fro-yo places. (Not to be a snob or anything haha)

Inside the cup was a gift card, so I can have many lunches from my favorite place!

You're probably wondering what I got him. I made him a card, and wrote him a sweet letter. Then I couldn't for the life of me think of anything to get him, so I just asked. He said he doesn't even know what he wants, and still has gobs of b-day money, and to not worry about getting him anything. That was easy, but I will still get him something...even if it's after valentine's day lol.

For our big v-day dinner, we went to our favorite place ever, Cheesecake Factory! His parents were very gracious and sent us some money to have a nice dinner, and we really enjoyed our amazing dinner. We got cheesecake to go since we were so full from the dinner.




And to end the longest post ever, our cute Jade with her Valentine's toy from my parents!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!