Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Cake Pops

I've been wanting to try cake pops again since the last time I tried they were a failure. This time I was prepared - I bought the book of all books from Bakerella! She is the master of cake pops - I wish I had her talent! I read the book cover to cover and love all the cute ideas in this book.
I finally had an excuse to make a lot of something - cake pops make over 60 pops - for Trevor's 5th Birthday! We needed treats for his class at school and his baseball team for practice the night of his birthday. Hard to believe that my baby boy is 5!You start out with cakes and cake frosting. You can use cake box mix and premade frosting, but I used the recipes in Bakerella's cookbook for both. I don't like to cheat like that! I did an experiment here. Knowing I was going to crumble the cakes up, I tried not using parchment paper in the bottom of my cake pans....with the GOOD cake pan I have it was fine - came out perfectly using just Pam. A work of art! This is what happened with the cheap cake pan I have using just Pam! Proves that sometimes you get what you pay for, right? After you bake the cakes you crumble them all up -this is fun! See why it didn't matter what my cakes looked like after coming out of the pan? Next put the frosting in with the crumbled cake and smoosh that all together. Actually a fun process I think!! Then you roll all of those into balls for the pops! With the frosting mixed in they roll into balls really easily. You then put them in the refrigerator for several hours or the freezer for a bit so they are nice and firm when you take the next step which is dipping them in chocolate. I had to gather lots of things for these ice cream cones....first the candy melts. Here's where I went wrong when I made these a few months ago. I just used regular semi sweet chocolate. I hadn't done enough research or paid enough attention to that detail! You buy the candy melts at Michael's and they come in all different colors. Trevor requested yellow ice cream cones. Lots of sprinkles were needed for the ice cream cones. Ice cream cones. I found these baby ones and thought they would be a perfect size for this. Bakerella actually uses the long sugar cones and cuts them down but this looked much easier to me!Red jelly beans to put on top. So what a mess this process was!!! This is before they have the final toppings on. You roll the cake balls into the chocolate. Then place them on the cone and put sprinkles on them. Sprinkles were all over my kitchen floor before the night was over! And it was a challenge to keep those little cones standing up while I was making them. The final steps were adding a bit of dark chocolate and jelly bean on top! Luckily for me the chocolate didn't have to be perfect to look like ice cream. Kind of messy was what we were going for. I'm not sure how you get them to be all smooth like the pictures in her book. It might be easier when you do a cake pop that is on a stick so you can use that to roll them. I'll have to try that on my next adventure. These did turn out really yummy. Trevor's friends all liked them at his school. And I had plenty to give to his baseball team that night at practice. A fun treat to make if you ever need to make a lot of something. Here's Trevor posing with his new spy goggles he got for his birthday and his cake pop treat.
Happy Birthday, Trevor! Happy Baking, Jen


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