Cake Pops!

Cake pops are AWESOME! I promise! And they are EASY!

I made cake pops for Everleigh's birthday party. I also made cupcakes and her smash cake. The smash cake came out only okay. The cupcakes were an utter fail due to a few different issues. I'll get to those later. The cake pops, however, were amazing. For me, there is a bit of finesse required to evenly coat them with candy coating and it definitely takes some practice.

The recipe/instructions I used are straight off of Bakerella.com (queen of cake pops). I have yet to try anything creative but I encourage anyone to GO FOR IT and SEND ME PICS! They are so fun! I used white candy coating (also called almond bark). I learned a few lessons from this. Not all candy coating is created equal. A friend told me she had no problem using Wilton's candy melts and next time I will definitely try this. My suggestion is that if you are going to use the almond bark kind, to buy the best quality there is. I used both Kroger brand and HEB brand and they were hard to work with. The HEB brand was darned near impossible to work with, actually. Many suggest adding a bit of vegetable oil to even out the candy consistency and make it easier to work with. It didn't make a difference for me. The Kroger kind worked okay once I got the hang of it, but if you are doing something more technically challenging than round balls, I'd say definitely get a higher quality candy melt.

Also, the amount of cake to frosting that you mix is really flexible and to your own taste. I used about 2/3 of a can of frosting to an entire cake. You could go more, you could go less. I love the play doh consistency that this mixture yields. When I have some free time and don't need to serve them to 30 guests, I might play around with shapes and designs. It really could be a lot of fun. Today is the first official day of fall. Fall is my favorite time of the year. Maybe in honor of Autumn I will practice with new cake pop designs for each upcoming holiday occasion. I'll let you know how it goes.

Cake Pops

1 box cake mix and it's required ingredients.
1 can cake frosting
lollipop sticks (1 cake makes about 75 cake pops)
Almond bark/ Candy coating/ Candy melts
Food coloring if neccessary

1. Bake your cake according to the directions. I used red velvet. Red velvet seems to be the traditional flavor of cake pops. You could use any flavor.
2. Once your cake is cool, crumble it up in a bowl. Like this:

3. Add about 2/3 to 1 whole can of frosting. I used cream cheese frosting, the traditional frosting paired with red velvet cake. You could use any flavor. 

4. Get your hands in there and mix it all up. It will end up like this:

5. Freeze mixture for about 15 minutes.

6. Channel your meatball making skils and make balls. A whole bunch of about 1 inch little balls. Like this:

7. Now they need to cool down. I put mine in the freezer for 15 minutes then in the fridge for 40 minutes. When you remove them don't remove them all at once because they will just warm up again while you are coating the others.

8. Heat up your candy coating and add food coloring at this time if necessary. Dip your lolli sticks in the candy about 1/2 inch and then stick into the cake ball as far in as possible. Repeat. Like this:

9. Once the candy sets up coat the entire cake ball in candy. Then stick the lolli stick into a block of styrofoam to dry. Like this:

The coating process may take a little trial and error. I found what worked best is to spoon the coating over the ball and spin it around until is was coated entirely. You may be able to dip the whole thing directly in the coating. My candy was cooling way to rapidly for that and would clump up and be so heavy on the cake ball that I would lose it when I pulled the stick out of the coating. I'm not sure if this is a candy coating issue or my own human error and lacking of technical ability. Regardless, I got them all done and think they looked pretty darn good. And they tasted even better.

10. Once the candy is dry you can put back in the fridge to totally set. Then wrap them up in fancy plastic bags with pretty ribbon and find a fun way to display them for your guests!

Pink Cake Pops



Orange Cake Pops

Orange, Pink and Blue cake pops. (The party colors!)