A few weeks ago I saw an article in Vashti Magazine about how to make Cake Pops and I immediately felt the urge to make them myself. They look so YUM! and they are sure to be a party pleaser on Halloween.
First thing’s first, I went grocery shopping to pick out a cake mix and some melting chocolate. I couldn’t believe that Save On Foods didn’t have any orange or black sprinkles. Shocking!
I used a Swiss Chocolate cake mix:
The cake pop recipe I’m using says to mix the cake in a food processor but since I don’t have one I simply tore it into pieces and crumbled it between my fingers:
The next step is to mix the icing into the cake mix. However, one of my twitter friends the Klumsy Artist, told me to watch out because cake pops made with store bought icing are almost too sweet to eat.
To cut the sweetness of the Betty Crocker prepared icing I mixed it 2 to 1 with margarine, added a teaspoon of vanilla, and a couple tablespoons of milk.
(To be honest, I actually mixed it closer to 1 to 1 and the icing started to taste too much like margarine so I added 1/2 cup of icing sugar to make it taste like icing again.)
The result was a nice butter-cream texture and flavour, much lighter than the packaged icing. Look at the difference in colour between my modified icing in the bowl and the store brand in the jar:
I then mixed a cup of my light creamy icing into the cake crumbs:
Using my hands I patted the mixture into a ball of cake fondant which has the consistency of very soft and fluffy cookie dough. You can still break it apart like cake, but you can form it like dough. It’s in-between:
I wanted to make sure my cake pops are all the same size so my husband had the idea of using a levelled off ice-cream scoop to measure out the filling. What a great idea! He modestly gave credit to the fact that he used to work at Tim Hortons. Genius I say.
These scoops would make gigantic cake pops so I took a knife and cut each one in half:
I counted up the scoops and realized I was only going to get 30 cake pops out of all this work. This recipe should make 40-50 so I promptly re-cut each ice-cream scoop of cake-pop-mixture into thirds rather than halves. This worked out to 44 cake pops instead of 30, woo hoo!
Here is the difference in size. See the half scoop sized ball on the left and the 1/3 sized ball on the right. Not a big loss in size for a big gain in quantity:
I was having a lot of fun and could have kept going but by this point the cake balls were getting soft and squishy and also a bit oily. Time to put them in the fridge for the night to let them set:
Oh boy, now it’s time to do the dishes:
Join me tomorrow when I finish creating my Halloween Cake Pops. :)
