As of Tuesday night, the cake pops are for the most part, done. They still need their little tags on, and I still need to get them in the freezer, but they are done. These babies were hanging over my head big time. I was super nervous about them and I am so very happy to have them behind me. And so, I thought I would lay out a few tips and tricks and things I learned along the way. Apologies in advance for the pictures. Some were taken during the day, but most were taken at night. You do what you can.
How do you make cake pops? You bake a cake. A box cake is fine, there’s no need to go homemade here, at least that’s what I kept telling myself. You want a certain texture for cake pops and box cake gives you that. I really wanted to bake these myself because seriously, homemade cake is easy to make, but I didn’t because it seemed like unnecessary overkill. Back to the cake, you bake it in a 9×13 pan. Then you crumble it into a big bowl, like so.
Add in 3/4 can of frosting. Again with the store bought and of course I considered homemade, but I went with the recommended here. Don’t buy whipped frosting, get the regular creamy stuff. Mix it together and roll it into balls the size of a golf ball. You want them as round as you can get them. Here’s tip #1 – Wash your hands frequently! It keeps the crumbs off your hands which keeps the crumbs off the cake balls. Tip #2 – I used Duncan Hines cake mix for the red velvet, and Betty Crocker for the yellow cake. The yellow cake was WAY easier to work with. Better texture, cleaner rolling, the whole nine. Go Betty. Put your balls on a wax paper lined pan and throw them in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Then, get yourself set up.
Melted candy melt of your choice in a tall, narrowish bowl, styrofoam with holes already poked, plate of firm but not frozen cake balls. I fit 14 cake pops onto each piece of styrofoam. That size worked well for me because it allowed me to work in small batches. Tip #3 – You can buy candy melts at Michael’s. I used red and brown. Of the two, the brown was way easier to work with (less drippy) and it tasted better. If I would do this again I would spring for the nice melting chocolate off the internets and go more for taste rather than cute. Tip #4 – Melt at least 24 ounces of candy coating. I started with that amount and added to it halfway through. You really want enough coating, don’t skimp.
Take your lollipop sticks and dip 1/2″ into the chocolate, then shove that baby into the cake ball. I noticed that my cake balls had a flat bottom from sitting on the pan, so I turned them upside down to make that the bottom of the cake ball, so I didn’t have flat tops. Make sure the chocolate dries before you dip. This is important.
The bowl you use to melt the chocolate in is also important. It needs to be narrow and tall, so that you get some nice depth because you want to completely submerge the cake pop. Dunk it in once, you do not want to dunk twice. That is bad news. Tip #5 – Make sure the melted chocolate covers the chocolate on the stick. It’s important to make this seal, otherwise you risk your cake pop falling off the stick. When my chocolate ran a little low, I dunked and then tipped the bowl to the side to ensure the chocolate completely covered everything. If you look at the picture below, you can see how my cake ball wasn’t completely smooth. I hate that, but because of the texture of the red velvet cake, there was only so much I could do.
Once you dunk, you need to get the excess chocolate off. So you tap, and then tap some more, and then wait, and twirl, and then tap some more. Personally, I wanted as thin of a candy coating as I could get so that you’d taste the cake, not just candy coating. Also, if you don’t tap the excess off it drips down the lollipop stick. Not so pretty. So wait until you don’t see any more drips, and then stick it in the styrofoam and grab the next one.
Each 9×13 cake makes 48 cake pops. Doing two cakes, I was going to make ~100 cake pops. I figured I would invite friends over and knock this task out. Except, it’s not really a multi-person task. Unless you melt multiple bowls of candy coating, it’s a one person thing. Overall, it took me about 1.5 hours to coat 48 cake pops. Not bad. I can’t imagine decorating all of those to look like chicks or sheep or panda bears. No matter how cute they might end up, no thank you to that one. I did try sprinkling colored sugar over them (also tried dunking them in sugar, that didn’t work at all) but it never looked right. I did yellow sugar on the red, and you could barely see it. In the end I melted some chocolate, put it in a squeeze bottle and did swirls on the top of each pop. Cute, and easy peasy. Add a hole punched cupcake topper and we’re good to go.
My plan is to slide the cupcake toppers on each, bag them up and freeze them. They thaw fairly quickly, so that shouldn’t be a problem. The last piece of the puzzle is display. I have outsourced that task to my mother. Pictures of that, plus cupcakes after Saturday’s party!
