My First Foray with Cake Pops

It seems like I'm on a roll about cake... but why not? It's delicious. For New Year's Eve, I decided to make cake pops, because they seemed to be a great party food, and seemed semi-easy. Right? WRONG. My first experience making them wasn't pretty, but in the end, they sure were delicious!

How to Make Cake Pops

Make and bake a boxed cake according to the directions (or make one from scratch!). You can really play around here, but I chose to do a regular ole chocolate cake. 

 Once the cake is baked and cooled (I let mine cool for around 30 minutes- you want to be able to touch it without burning yourself), you need to crumble the cake into really fine pieces. This part is really bizarre, but fun. While I was breaking up the cake, I kept telling my sister that "It feels so wrong!"

Once your cake is crumbled finely, add icing to the cake crumbs. I added about 1/3 of a cup of chocolate icing. Again, I used a can of whipped icing from the store, but you can make your own, and play around with flavours. My cake was really moist so I didn't need a lot of icing, but you can add as much as you need to get your cake to stick together. 

 Once the icing is added, start rolling the mixture into balls. In hindsight, you'll want to make smaller, bite sized balls. I made mine too large and it caused problems later on in the process.

 Lay out the balls on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Put them in the freezer for at least 6 hours. I let mine stay in there overnight (because I did this at about 10 pm). 

It was all relatively easy up until this point. Here's where she got gnarly, and thus, accounts for the lack of pictures. You need to take your cake balls out of the freezer for a few minutes, and then start coating them. I did one at a time. Take one ball, insert the stick (I used wooden skewers... except I put the blunt end into the ball, and kept the pointed end at the bottom to stick into the box) and dip it into melted chocolate. After you dip the ball, roll it around in a circular motion, while gently tapping your wrist to get the excess off. Continue doing this until you are satisfied. (Lots of un-ladylike cussing at this point). 

 I used milk chocolate chips.... I would not recommend this. I would recommend buying the wafers from Wilton. The chocolate was heavy, and the balls were too big (That's what she said-- I had to haha), and this resulted in some balls falling off the skewers, not drying fast enough, and just being a plain pain in the butt. 

Nevertheless, once the cakeball was coated in chocolate, I sprinkled on a variety of sprinkles and then stuck them in their display (Which, in this case, is an old box covered with some holiday foil paper). Next time, I'm going to use a piece of foam. They won't jiggle around as much.

 Here are the finished products. I think they look purdy, despite the devil of a time they gave me while they were being created.

These were BEFORE I had to transport them 20 minutes away... After a journey, they did not look this good. So again, I would recommend a) using a piece of foam to hold them, OR b) only making them if the party is at your house. Nonetheless, they were a big hit- not a single one went to waste! They tasted delicious, and I can see how versatile these could really be. So, have you guys had any experience with making cake pops? Was your experience any better than mine?