cake pop adventures

It all started with an email from a 4th grade room mother... What would you like to contribute to the class "friendship" (formerly known as Valentine's Day) party?

I offered to provide three dozen cupcakes, of course. The Hot Chocolate Cupcakes I made for the winter holiday party were a big hit and cupcakes are so fun and easy. But then I thought... Cake Pops would be fun to try... Obviously, I'm not an early adopter with these baking trends. So, I did a little online research and found wonderful information and tutorials. The undisputed cake pop queen, of course, is Bakerella.

It seems the way to go is with "your favorite cake mix and your favorite canned frosting," and I almost, almost talked myself into that. How easy! But then I thought... buttercream would taste so much better than canned frosting... and... you know, cake from scratch is not that much more work... And that is exactly where things began to spin out of control...

When you're making treats for a class of 35 fourth graders, it's nice to have at least two flavor options so I decided to make a White Butter Cake and a Devil's Food Cake (both from The Simple Art of Perfect Baking by Flo Braker), and a swiss meringue buttercream (Martha) and a chocolate buttercream (Flo). Well, that's a Saturday afternoon attached to the Kitchen Aid right there. The cakes and buttercreams baked and whipped nicely and I took the night off to enjoy dinner at a funky little Thai restaurant.

Sunday afternoon came and it was time to crumble the cakes, stir in the buttercream and start forming cake balls. My advise is to refrigerate the dough before forming. I formed room temperature chocolate dough into little cake balls and it was a big mess!

Rolling the dough is easy enough, and each cake will make at least 48 cake balls. Smaller cake balls are a little easier to work with and decorate, and they actually look better too. After the dough is formed into balls, chill for about an hour before attaching the lollipop sticks.

I used Winton candy melts, and I read that Paramount Crystals would help smooth the coating and make dipping easier, but I didn't have any. A quick google search revealed that a little bit of shortening stirred into the melted coating would yield a similar result - and it did! Dipping was much easier with the shortening enhanced candy coating. Dipping is also easier and yields a better finished product when the cake balls are well chilled. I mixed a few candy colors to vary my shades of pink, and covered some with sanding sugar or sprinkles and piped little designs on others using a small disposable piping bag.

In the end, I had 8 dozen very cute and tremendously delicious cake pops. Most of them went to fourth and fifth grade class parties, but shared a few with my valentine, took a batch to share with coworkers and even delivered a little cake pop bouquet to a client.

This undertaking was similar to having a baby... right afterwards I thought "never again!" But now... what kind of cake pops should I make for St. Patrick's Day?

Happy baking!