Bridal Shower Favors

I must admit that I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with chocolate.  On one hand, who can resist its rich, delicious flavor!  On the other hand, it can be quite temperamental and difficult to work with.  This is especially true when it comes to working with chocolate in a hot or humid environment.  Thankfully, the heatwave we recently experienced had come to an end, eliminating at least one difficult factor, and allowed me to work on this most recent project: cake pop favors and chocolate covered pretzels for a bridal shower!

The color scheme for the upcoming wedding is blue and yellow, so I wanted to incorporate various tints of those two colors with the chocolate I used.  Even though the weather cooperated, I still found that I had to adjust how I heated and cooled the chocolate so it would melt and set properly on the pretzels.  Regarding the cake pops, I had a little difficulty finding a good, melted consistency for the chocolate dipping process.  The same goes for piping the white chocolate swirly design due to the small piping tip opening (compared to frosting cupcakes with much wider piping tip openings).  If the chocolate's too hot, it will drip and run all over; if the chocolate's too cool, it will clog the small tip opening and won't come out at all.  But after some trial and error, a perfect middle ground was found.  I added a white fondant flower (made ahead of time) with a silver dragée on top of each cake pop and once the design was fully set, it was ready to be wrapped!  

I placed each cake pop into individual treat bags, added some ribbon and the favor tags, and it was set to go!  The blue cake pops have chocolate chip cake inside and the yellow were a plain vanilla cake.  Here's how both the pops and pretzels looked on the dessert table: