Thursday 26 May 2011

pop goes the cake: part deux

After my trial run this morning, I have come to quite a few conclusions about this cake pop business:
  • It's tricky to make them all the same size, or to even make them spherical. Mine look like meatballs. Meatballs that have been whacked with squash racquets by very uncoordinated people.
  • They keep falling off the stick when you dip them and tap off the excess. I suspect my cake crumble mix has too much icing in it. I've dipped the sticks in chocolate and popped the balls in the freezer before dipping (as suggested here: http://veronicascornucopia.com/2011/05/12/cake-pops-balls-truffles-troubleshooting-faq/), to no avail. Which leads me to...
  • The chocolate coating has cracked. Apparently this is from either overheating the chocolate (which I don't think is the case) or keeping the balls in the freezer for too long.
  • When using candy melts, you've got to get your sprinkles on very quickly after dipping as it hardens fast.
  • If you don't have a styrofoam block and lollipop sticks (e.g. for testing purposes), you can use a colander and bamboo skewers cut to length. The pointy ends of the skewers don't work well though, as the balls slip off the ends more easily.
My rather sad attempt at cake pops.
 Cake pops are a cute idea and if you've got the knack for it, they'd be fun to make for parties. For me, they're far too fiddly and temperamental (especially with small children in the house who constantly need to be fed, watered, and pried away from breakable things). I'd happily make these in a small batch and do a little more practicing to fix all of the issues I mentioned, but I'm planning on doing something for roughly 70 people in just over 2 weeks, and I will lose the will to live if I carry on with the cake pops.

I do have an alternative plan (supplies pending) that may save me a lot of time and headaches that will hopefully still have that itty bitty cakey cuteness factor. In the meantime, I've got two little girls who are very eager to taste test the cake pops, cracks and all.

2 comments:

Deathway said...

Don't be discouraged - cake pops are difficult, from what I've read and yours look good! One question, what did you use as a binding agent? I'm not a fan of buttercream and as I'm in the UK have no idea what 'frosting' is!!

Mrs Dee said...

Thanks. :) I'm in the UK, too. Frosting is icing. Most people seem to use a combination of cream cheese and icing sugar (something like 100g cream cheese to 200g icing sugar, I think?) But actually for the recipe I used in the end, I didn't use anything to bind it as the cake was very moist.