No Need for Sticks!

Happy Birthday Month to me!!

September brings CAKE POP MONTH! I've only attempted cake pops once before (for a holiday party at our apartment) and they gave me a little bit of trouble back then. I used a favorite red velvet cupcake recipe and my cake pop maker and they turned out great. I decided to use white chocolate chips to cover the pops and then red and gold sprinkles for added holiday decoration. I failed to get a Styrofoam block to stick them up in, so I laid them flat on a plate. This didn't go well as they literally stuck permanently to the plate and were extremely hard to remove for some reason!

In conclusion, they were delicious!

This time around for my sister's Labor Day cookout, I used a very simple vanilla cupcake recipe to make vanilla cake pops and planned on using Wilton's chocolate candy melts to cover the pops. Then of course rainbow sprinkles for fun.

These provided many problems!! First of all, the cupcake recipe I used didn't yield the best results for the cake pops. I have used the recipe before for regular cupcakes and everything was dandy. For some reason, the cake pops in the maker did not rise. They looked more like mushrooms or basically an epic cake pop failure!

Time to improvise! (I've been getting pretty good at this lately!)

I've watched numerous videos of Bakerella making cake pops on YouTube and she doesn't even have a cake pop maker. She uses a different method of baking a boxed cake (of course this term doesn't even exist in my vocabulary), breaking the cake up into little pieces, adding a can of pre-made icing (another yuck!) to the crushed cake, and forming her own balls.

I resorted to this method but instead made my own homemade butter cream (just a tad!) and added this to the crumbled cake pop disaster so that the mixture was pliable and easy to roll into the balls. I froze the mixture for about 30 minutes so that it was easier to roll. This method left me with about 30-35 cake pops!

Then came the other disaster. (These really aren't disasters but instead road blocks that I encourage myself to get through by improvising). The chocolate candy melts didn't melt right at all. It was a thick frosting-like substance which DID NOT make well for dipping.

Mars to the rescue!!!

After already going out once to Mars supermarket to get more powdered sugar for the small amount of butter cream icing that I needed, I went BACK out to get chocolate chips.

I simply melted the chocolate chips, dipped the cake balls, laid them out on parchment paper, and sprinkled with rainbow sprinkles and gold sprinkles that I had laying around my apartment.

I left them on the parchment paper, placed them in the fridge again, and awaited the cook out hour.

P.S.: I didn't use the sticks because there were only 18 of them that came with the cake pop maker and I didn't want to have to worry about people throwing them away by accident (they are plastic and reusable). Therefore, these were CAKE BALLS! and everyone enjoyed them very much :)

After all the trouble I went through and the multiple "disasters" everyone was going back for more!

They were so moist and scrumptious because of the added butter cream (I recommend using the process I used). It was a complete mess dipping/making the cake pops with melted chocolate with my hands but the outcome was extremely desirable.

I highly recommend making cake balls or cake pops for cookouts or occasions where there is a variety of finger foods present in the room. People can easily walk right by, snatch one up, and of course come back for more! I also like the balls better than the pops just because they were easier to arrange many of them nicely on a plate (Styrofoam is really expensive for some reason!)

I'm thinking cake pop skewers are coming next! In the mean time, I am preparing for my next cupcake order (3 dozen) for this Thursday. This means that the next cake pop blog special will not be until the 16th.

See, Shawn wanted more too!!

Happy Baking!