Cake Pop Adventures

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Have you heard of the fabulousness that is Bakerella? If not, get thee over to her site to learn all about the beautiful and bite-sized baked goods she has created. You will drool over all of the sugary food p*rn she has to share.

Needless to say, when our neighbors Rob and Jill bought me Bakerella's Cake Pops book (completely out of the blue and so nice - thank you again!), I was thrilled. I knew all about cake pops, but had never attempted them or even looked into the process of making these yummy little treats. I ended up having so much fun with a whole lot of sugar!
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Bakerella suggests you use a cake mix and a can of frosting for your first cake pop adventure, as the proportions are perfect and box cake mix lends itself well to the project because of the texture. I generally don't use mixes because, well, it's easy to make cake and frosting from scratch and I like knowing exactly what is going into my baked goods. So I opted to use the yellow cake recipe from her book as well as the vanilla frosting recipe. Loved them! Both were super tasty and the cake baked up beautifully.

The fun part is that even if the cake was horrendously ugly/flat/wonky you just crumble it up after it cools anyway. I do wish that I had made the cake a day in advance, as the cake would have been a little dryer in texture. I also with that I hadn't added all of the frosting at once! Less is more, people. Less is more. I ended up with some, err, squishy balls. Once you have crumbled the cake, it looks like you have such a large quantity of cake crumbles that you will need all of the frosting, but you definitely don't.

Fortunately, my balls firmed up well enough that I was able to work with them, but the texture of the final product wasn't quite where I wanted it to be. But no worries, they were over-the-top tasty in the end.

Bakerella's book gives you a million different cute cake creations. I opted for the classic cupcake pop. Super cute but slightly stressful as you have to dip with two different colors of candy coating. Fortunately, the candy coating dries super fast, so there isn't a lot of lag time between dips.


Because I was taking these into work, and didn't fancy myself setting up a huge display in the office kitchen, I only made a few as actual "pops" and the rest were left as little cupcake balls that I could put on a cute plate.


The pops were both delicious and fun and I can't wait to have a fun event / party / basically any excuse to make these again. Yum!