A cake pop trial.

You’re probably sick of hearing about cake pops now that this is the third post that mentions them, but it’s a recipe worth keeping, so the blog must continue!

Cake pops are gaining a crazy amount of popularity, just see www.bakerella.com to get the idea. She has a book out on all the different variations these treats can take – I’m talking reindeer, cupcakes, trees, even farm animals…no joke, see for yourself!

{source: http://www.instructables.com/id/Cake-Pops/}

{source: http://www.babble.com/holiday-gift-guide/2009/stocking-stuffers/}

I went with the plain & simple for my first attempt at the cake pops. I didn’t have a recipe, but I found hints from other blogs out there & also used this helpful video on amazon.com from Bakerella.

So here’s the process…

Cakepops

1 cake mix & the ingredients needed to make the cake
1 tub of frosting
sprinkles
food coloring
colored sugar crystals
lollipop sticks {I found these at Walmart,$2 for 50 }

So first, you bake your cake. I picked chocolate cake and chocolate icing. I’m sure any cake/icing combo would work great. Once your cake’s completely cooled, you slice it in quarters or sixths and crumble the pieces into a large mixing bowl.

Once you’ve finished crumbling the cake, you want to add your frosting. I used almost the entire tub, but next time I’ll use left – maybe just 2/3 of it. My mixture was a bit more moist than I wanted, making it trickier to keep the cake balled together.

Using a spoon {or your hands} mix the frosting in with the cake crumbles. Then you shape 1” to 2” balls and place them on a cookie sheet {be prepared, this is messy}.

Once you’ve formed all the cake pop balls {mine made 47}, you pop ‘em in the freezer for fifteen minutes to chill. Don’t leave them in there longer than that because you don’t want them to freeze. Transfer them to the refrigerator if you need to keep them cool while you work.

While they’re in the freezer, you can melt your bark in the microwave as it says on the package directions. I found that having the melted bark in a coffee mug worked the best for me because it was deep enough for the cake pop to be covered easily.

You’ll also want to pour out your sprinkles or crystal sugar into bowls with spoons.

Lovin’ the bright colors!

Once your pops are chilled and your bark’s melted, you dip the end of the lollipop stick into the bark and then about halfway into the cake ball.

From there, you submerge the cake ball straight into the melted bark. It’s really important that you just place it straight down into the bark and remove it straight out of the bark without swirling the cake pop around in the bark {see the amazon video linked above.}  If you move it around the cake pop will likely fall off the stick.

Once you pull the cake pop out of the bark, you want to gently tap your hand that’s holding the cake pop to remove the excess drips. {Again, see the video where she demonstrates this.} This, to me, was the most annoying step because you have to be patient and soft with it – you can see below that this was one of the first ones I made and I must have swirled it or tapped off the excess to hard & the cake pop is tilted on the lollipop stick.

Okay, after the bark is done dripping off the cake pop, you can use a teaspoon to sprinkle the sugar crystals or sprinkles over top of the cake pops – don’t work too slowly because the bark will harden quickly.

From there, you can either stick them into a styrofoam block to harden, or {like me} gently place them upside down on a wax paper covered cookie sheet. {This worked for me because I wanted to display them upside down on a cake pedestal.}

You can also use your food coloring to dye the bark to a color to match your party. I did half my cake pops with the white bark, and dyed it blue for the second half. {Cute!}

After doing 47 cake pops, I still had some melted bark left over, so I dipped some pretzel rods. I actually had a few people say they liked the pretzels better than the usual white chocolate covered pretzels.

 

Once the cake pops have hardened, they make such a cute tasty treat that’s easy {well, that’s relative, but they weren’t the hardest recipe I’ve done, that’s for sure!} and offers lots of ways to customize them for your holiday or party.

As I said before, they were definitely a hit at the baby shower!

Yup, it’s a long process, and it’s pretty mess but so gosh darn cute!