Cake Pops!

For Jody's wedding shower, I decided to make these adorable Cake Pops! that a girl at work introduced me to. You can find the directions on how to make them here, but I'll just share some of the tips and tricks I learned along the way to make it easier.

First of all, the recipe calls for a whole can of icing. This makes the consistency much too sticky and difficult to work with - it's more like a dough at that point when you want a moist, cakey texture. So half a can of icing turned out to be the perfect amount.

I think some people recommend using a cake baller (like a mini ice cream scoop), but I found that it was easier if Matt and I just hand-rolled the cake mixture into the sizes we wanted.

Then it got even trickier - we had cooled the cake balls over night, and in the morning we started the process of putting them on sticks and priming them for dunking in the chocolate. Our mistake was taking out the whole pan of cake balls and trying to get them all on sticks at once. That gave them time to thaw out, which led to balls crumbling apart in the hot chocolate mixture! But then again, it's not a true Pamela Baking Day if we don't have at least one disaster/meltdown. Poor Matt - he puts up with me so well :) So to solve this problem, we found that it was easier to leave the balls in the freezer and just pull them out 2 at a time to work with. That was fine, since you have to re-heat the chocolate after every 2 dunks anyways to keep it from hardening in the glass. Very Cold Balls + Very Hot Chocolate = Success

That's another good trick - using a tall glass to melt your chocolate in, rather than a bowl. On our first trial of making the Cake Pops, we used the bowl method and found it hard to swirl the Pops around to get full chocolate coverage. A lot of them fell apart or had bare sides and it did not look as pretty. By dunking the Pops straight down in a tall glass of chocolate, you get full, smooth coverage without all of the hassle.

And yet another tip - splurge for the good chocolate!! We tried just using the chocolate chip morsels that you can buy at the grocery store, but they didn't look or taste as good. So I went to a cake specialty store and bought baker's chips (someone told me you can also find them at Michael's). They had a lot of different colors to choose from - I went with purple to fit the theme of the party, and also added in some white for funsies. I bought the cute little heart sprinkles there too - I think I spent way more than I should have at that cake shop, but I was in baker's heaven!

Jordan helping out

Matt also made me this nifty Cake Pop Holder by spacing holes in a slab of styrofoam about 2 inches apart. That way, I could cool the Pops in an upright position to avoid flat sides during cooling. Plus, it looked really adorable when all of the Pops were on there - like a little field of cake :)

When I saw that they were selling Cake Pops at Starbucks for $2 a piece, I thought it was such a rip-off. But after spending a day trying to make 100 of these treats, I decided that $2 each is a more than fair price - ha!! The end result was great, though, and everybody loved the look and taste of the Pops! I will definitely be making them again, but I think it will be a special-occasion-only treat :)