Cake Pops! 1st Attempt (Ingredients & Recipe)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PHRASES SUCH AS ‘INSERT THE STICKY END OF YOUR STICK INTO THE BALLS’
There is no way to dance around every ball-innuendo, so I’m just going to say what I mean, and we can all have a little giggle at the end. 

Cake Pops are storming the internet like a manic-sugar-filled craze by bloggers and Youtubers alike all hopped up on Candy Melts. So of course, I’ve commissioned the help of a friend with Kitchen-know-how, because I need all the help I can get in the kitchen department. This is why I’m with a Chef.  I know what I’m doing; I knew I needed to hitch my wagon to someone who knew they had to feed me. 

Cake Pops look so kitsch and cute but we have all seen the horrific fails on Pinterest. In fact, I might paste in some fail pictures so ours don’t look so bad at the end.

On the other hand, how awesome are these? Cake Pops with awesome things on!  And just so we know, the doctor ones remind me of Grey’s Anatomy; I don’t just enjoy hospitals. 

I am completely aware that our Cake Pops don’t have a chance in hell of being as good as these little Starbucks Cappuccino’s but I have faith in our attempt. 

So, let’s get on with the story.

 I arrived at Cassi’s at 4pm; “plenty of time” we said. A quick pop to both Sainsburies and Tescos – we gathered our ingredients.  Deciding to make a slightly classier cake pop, we went with Sicilian Lemon flavouring for the cakey-middles and a dark chocolate to coat them. Fuelling our love for sprinkles and glitter, we chose Lemon Meringue Sprinkles to go on top as well as some Banofee ones. Admittedly, the banoffee flavours maybe wouldn’t marry so nicely with the lemon/dark chocolate theme but what the hell. 

Following a measurements guide that I borrowed from a Zoella video on Youtube, we measured out our ingredients and realised we didn’t have a cake recipe. Trusty BBC Food online quickly provided us with a Fairy Cake Recipe and we were on our way! I’d also seen a Niomi Smart video on Youtube, which made them look so easy and simple – with Cassi on my side, I couldn’t see us meeting any big problems. Which is interesting seeing as the evening started like this;

Me: I’m going to need a whisk.

Cassi: I have an electric whisk?

Me: Nah, I can use a hand whisk.

(Five minutes, pratting around with a hand whisk.)

Me: Yes, I’m going to need your electric whisk.

From the pictures above, so far, we look like we’re being fairly neat. This is not true, as you can see by the ‘after’ baking picture in the bottom-right hand corner.

We baked our cake mixture for around fifteen minutes and checked if they were done with one of our cake pop sticks. It came out clean, so they were done and this is where we fell as the first hurdle.  I feel like our thought process literally went ‘Yay, they’re done! – Let’s decorate them!’

THIS IS NOT THE MIND FRAME YOU WANT TO BE IN. 

Having learned the hard way, we jumped straight into decorating and attempting getting our cake-balls to sit on the sticks. Looking back in hindsight, I probably should have done more research on this stage of the game. Our cake balls were either too warm in the middle still or the chocolate on the end of the sticks wasn’t solid enough yet.  I will put a full ingredients list and recipe a little further down, so you can follow it if you want, but for the moment this is just a commentary of do’s and don't's.

After a little Googling and many cake-themed message boards we learned that we should have let the cake-balls in the freezer, before putting the pop-sticks in. So instead, what we did was put the sticks in and then freeze them. Only for ten minutes or so, but this became the answer to our problems; the chocolate on the end of the sticks (to secure the balls on the sticks) solidified wonderfully and we were, at last, finally good to go on the decorating front.  

It was, unfortunately, at this point that we realised we had no idea how to store the cake-ops upright. Balls up, if you will. This is where a lot of ‘pinterest fails’ appear. I would say your best bet is to cover some Oasis Floristry Foam in delightful wrapping paper and storing them in that, post-decoration. Y’know, if you want to be super fancy. 

As you can see, our cake-balls overflowed a little but we simply trimmed them down until they looked like teeny tiny planets. This is where the idea of a full series of planets came to me – it made me want to create a whole solar system of cake pops. I digress.

 So, the Pops in the egg box were our first attempt and the Pops in the duck-egg blue cup were dubbed ‘the good ones’. We decorated the Pops and then put them back in the freezer for a further ten minutes or so.
In the meantime we used up left over cake mix to create the Lemon Loaf (top right hand corner, the one that doesn’t look like a cake pop).

 

Needless to say, I assume, ‘the good ones’ were the Cake Pops that we presented to our respective other halves as the result of a long evening’s hard work. I met Cassi at 4pm and we didn’t make it out again until 10pm.

Why did it take six hours to collect ingredients and make Cake Pops? I don’t know.
Were they worth it? Probably; the laughs at least definitely were.

Ingredients:
Makes 20.
Takes 1 hr. (Apparently.)

120g Softened Unsalted Butter.
150g Unrefined Caster Sugar.
1tsp Whatever Extract You’re Using.
2 Free Range Eggs.
180g Self Raising Flour.
4 tbsp Milk (Room Temp, apparently.)
2 Bars of Cooking Chocolate (Dark/White/Whatever...)
Vegetable Oil
Cake-Pop Moulds/Sticks
Sprinkles etc.
Cups/Egg Box/ Oasis Floristry Foam/ Polystyrene. 

Recipe:
Could take you all day, just saying.

1.       Make your cake mix. You can use the fairy cake recipe from BBC Food Online for that. I’ll link it here.

2.       Use two teaspoons to shimmy some of the mix into the silicone Cake-Pop moulds. I would say somewhere between heaped and level.

3.       Wait somewhere between 15 and 22 minutes depending on the trust you have in your oven. Ours came out in 15 minutes, but I’ve seen people online take 22 minutes.

4.       As soon as your cake-balls are done (stick a cake-pop stick into one, and if it comes out clean they’re done) take the mould lids off, and put them in the freezer. This chills the balls (haha) and will make the next steps easier.

5.       Melt your chocolate in a glass bowl over some boiling water in a sauce pan. Do not put your chocolate in a microwave, as we learned, this is not a good way to go.

6.       Once your chocolate is melted, remove balls from freezer, squeeze them gently out of the moulds. It doesn’t really matter if they’re not perfectly spherical – the decorations later will hide any mishaps. Dip your cake pop sticks into the melted chocolate, just the tip, and then push them gently into your  cake balls; from experience, I’d say about halfway into your balls. If you can, store them upside down (in an egg box, possibly) and put them back into the freezer for a further five minutes or so to solidify the ‘sticking’ chocolate.

7.       When the ‘sticking’ chocolate is officially hardened enough to your satisfaction, remove them from the freezer and the decorative process can start. Yay!

8.       Slowly dip and roll them in your melted chocolate, hand them to your handy co-worker and let them sprinkle to their hearts content. Repeat until all balls are chocolate covered and decorated.

9.       Store them again in the freezer until shells are hardened.

10.    Cake Pops will only last three days or so, so if serving at a party or giving as a gift, I suggest making them the day before and storing them in the fridge for no longer than fifteen minutes.

11.    Hurrah Cake-Pops.

Have you guys made Cake Pops? How did they go? Any tips and tricks for next time? Let me know in the comment section below. :)