Cake Pops- Round 1

The other day, my friend and I decided to try to make cake pops. When someone describes them, don't they seem easy?

1. Make round balls.
2. Shove stick in.
3. Submerge in candy melts.
4. Voila! Beautiful cake pop.

............Wrong. 

Let me tell ya, they weren't as easy as I thought they were going to be. Don't let those pics up top there deceive you. Out of about 25 balls, we only got a few cute ones. I even prepped by watching tons of YouTube videos and reading recipes before making them. Well, they didn't help with these. I want to specifically reference this blog post Cake Pops Are Not Easy because she describes how the first attempt at making cake pops doesn't go as well as one may hope. Our results were the same to the T. For example: the pops falling off the sticks and into the candy melts, producing a "crumby" candy coating that wasn't cute at all. Not to mention the sprinkles we accidentally got in it. Note to self: don't decorate over your bowl of candy melts... That is if you can even get the melts to a good consistency in the first place.

So, here are some of the pics from our trial and error cake pop baking:

 

L: Look at that adooorable packaging for the sticks!

R: Easy (cheap) way to take pops on the go- solo cup! 

L: Heart molds! Cute but waaay too heavy for dipping 

and not wide enough to put the stick in very well.

R: Pink=cake pop maker (weird UFO shapes), Yellow=hand molded.

Baking Tip #8: So many things went wrong while we were making these. The biggest being that the balls (hey! get your mind outta the gutter!) kept falling off the sticks. Now, we did do one thing right in that we coated the tip of the stick before shoving it into the bottom of the ball. Though, make sure you don't dip all of the sticks in one color and then try to cover it with other colors, it doesn't work. Trust me. I don't know if it was because some of the balls were too small or we didn't let them sit long enough to harden or we didn't use enough candy melt on the end of the stick. It was probably a combo of all. Either way, most of our cake pops were lopsided because they started to come off of the stick (or completely did, thus creating the "crumby candy melts") or the coating was too heavy for them. We did make them two ways, a cake pop maker (the pink balls) and the cake crumbles + frosting (the yellow balls). I think the cake pop maker didn't make them as solid inside and a little small so they didn't hold the candy melts as well and the other balls did. Though, neither were perfect.

Baking Tip #9: Another (among many) problem was that our candy melts just weren't working for us. First of all, the bowl we melted them in wasn't deep enough to dip the cake ball in. So, make sure you use a deep enough bowl that allows you to dip the entire ball into it. That way, you can submerge the pop and rock it back and forth in the melts to coat the whole thing (don't swirl it around, that's what makes it fall off). Once we switched to a deeper bowl, we were able to dip the whole thing in, but when it came to getting the excess liquid off, that didn't work either. I think we never got the melts hot enough so it wasn't thin enough to drip off and hardened really quickly. I've seen it done two ways: microwave and double boiler. I tried the microwave and it was okay, but next time I'm going to try the double boiler. What's there to lose in trying a different approach? Nothing!!

It was still A LOT of fun [and work] making the pops. Everyone at work loved them even if they weren't the most beautiful things ever. I can't wait to attempt Round 2!! They'll be better then, right??? Oh, and one last quick question, how do you devour your cake pop?

Until later,
Baker in Training