March 2026 "These Cake Pops Left me Changed (Not) for Good" by Mariah Decker

     I would like to start by saying that I am not a baker by any means. The only time I ever enter the kitchen is to eat food that someone else has already made or to throw a microwave meal into the microwave. Yet recently, my life was changed (for good) by the movie Wicked. In the spirit of trying new things and seeing that the movie was free for streaming, I decided to put it on and see what all the hype was about. Turns out, I was missing out on one of my favorite movies to date. I’m not a big musical person, but this genuinely changed me. So much so that when I saw these uncomfortably green and pink cake pops at Save Mart, I just had to try them. So, I invited a friend over, and after buying the cake pop mix, we got to work.

     The first warning sign should have been the smell. It was...different. To me, it smelled like sweet chemicals. After the butter was added, it somehow got worse. Also, WORD OF WARNING! So, the main gimmick is that you don’t know what color you’re getting until you mix it, and it turns either Elphaba green or Glinda pink. HOWEVER—as soon as we opened the box and poured the mix into a bowl, you can literally tell what color you’re getting because there are colored specks in it. Talk about a spoiler alert. Betty Crocker, do better. So, not surprisingly, we got Elphaba green. I like Elphaba more than Glinda, but I was hoping for the pink because it looked better. But the green color shown on the box wasn’t too bad...but here comes another WORD OF WARNING. The actual color of the cake pops resembles vomit. I wish I had taken a photo, but I was too busy covering my mouth and nose with my shirt and looking away from how absolutely wicked the mix looked. I think the best way to describe it would be to compare it to Elphaba’s melted remains when Dorothy no-scopes her with the bucket of water. When we saw this, my friend and I joked about just tossing it because it was genuinely vile, but just like Elphaba on her quest to save the animals of Oz, we didn’t give up. We got to rolling the dough into balls and then let them sit until they hardened.

     While we waited for them to harden, we started on the frosting. The box came with a small bag of meltable white chocolate chips, but the bag was impossible to open. My friend passed it off to me, and I tried opening it like a bag of chips, but it wouldn’t budge. I started looking for the scissors, but then she told me I was a weakling. This made me mad—the snarky comment combined with the wickedly awful fumes radiating from the cake pops nearby was a recipe for disaster. I grabbed the bag again and ripped it as hard as I could, and then it exploded. The chocolate chips flew everywhere like flying monkeys. Some of them landed on the counter, but most ended up on the floor. An old leftover bag of Ghirardelli white chocolate chips ended up saving the day, so we melted those together with the ones provided in the box and had just enough frosting to cover all of the cake pops. Except I kind of wished we didn’t, because the result was a cacophony of wicked tastes and flavors.

     After what felt like an eternity of “You try it firsts” and “No, you do it,” we both bit the literal bullets that were these Wicked cake pops and somehow survived. The texture was nothing short of horrendous—think Kinetic sand with a very strong buttery flavor. The frosting also did not go on nicely at all, like the box. I remember looking at my friend and seeing that her lips were now stained Elphaba green. My own lips, to my absolute horror, had also turned Elphaba green. Whether we liked it or not, the cake pops were now us...or we were now the cake pops. Whatever the case, one thing was certain: we were changed that night. And not for good.