Cake Pops

I defy anyone to see a picture of a cake pop and not be a bit intrigued.

What’s in them? How do you make them? Can I have one?

I had seen these on FoodGawker and was itching to have a go. The School Spring Fair seemed like a good enough reason. Surely small children at a fete would like a bite of cakey goodness.

It seemed bonkers to me that all the recipes involve buying a cake mix (I am not down with shop bought cake mixes) baking it, then mushing it up. As I’d already made 3 dozen cakes that day I went trashy and bought a chocolate marble bar cake from the supermarket and whizzed it up in the Magimix.

I then added some chocolate fudge buttercream, about 2-3 tablespoons, and mixed it into a chocolate goo and rolled it into balls. I then put them in the fridge for a while, to firm up, and pondered my next move.

We had not got any lolly sticks, so wooden skewers were an option. Then Ed revealed his stash of coffee stirrers purloined from McDonalds. He uses them for spreading woodglue in the workshop. I went for the stack of new ones, without glue.

I tried doing what Bakerella suggested by first dipping the stick in the chocolate, then pronging the choco balls and dipping them in said melted chocolate, but they dropped off. This may be because I refuse to use any sort of ‘cooking chocolate’ so my melted mix of milk and dark chocolate was quite thick.

I eventually worked on a process of throwing the cakey pops into the chocolate one at a time, rolling them around and then sticking the stick in to fish them out. After smearing some of the excess chocolate off I dipped them in sprinkles and set them to dry on silicon paper.

This flattened them off a bit like toffee apples so I also dried some balanced on a colander as suggested by bakingquinn and this worked well:

These looked a bit forlorn without decoration so when they had set in a cool room overnight I rolled some of them in edible holographic glitter. Well, why not?

Whilst photographing them I had to try one. Just to make sure they were ok, you understand. They are kind of like a cheats chocolate truffle.

Then I packaged them up and took them to the Spring Fair. They went down well and all sold out.

Hurrah for cake pops!