Cake Pops

 

Cake Pops are a tasty and creative alternative to cupcakes.
They are easy but time consuming to make, and I haven't met a person who doesn't love them!

I love making them for parties or just as treats for the children after school. This recipe makes 25-35 Cake Pops that can be stored in the fridge for up to a week.

You will need to make a sponge cake, I normally make a chocolate cake but you can use any flavour cake (plain, lemon, coffee etc). This is a basic chocolate cake recipe:

6oz Soft Butter
6oz Sugar
3 eggs
5oz Self Raising Flour
2 oz cocoa

Lots of bakers insist on creaming butter and sugar together first. Personally I have found no difference in the cake if you put all ingredients into the mixer and blend them together, though I find the longer you can leave them - ideally several minutes - mixing then lighter the sponge.

Put your sponge mixture into a baking tin and bake at 180 degrees for 25 minutes or until cooked. Leave to cool.

While your cake is cooling, mix up the icing (flavoured as your cake):

2oz soft butter
1oz Cocoa Powder
4oz Icing sugar
Dash of Milk

Now break the cake into a bowl using your hands so that you end up with fine crumbs. Add 2 rounded tablespoons of the icing. Again with your hands knead the icing into the cake (slowly add more icing until it gels together). Fashion into small pingpong sized balls and lay on a baking sheet.

In my typical impatient fashion I like to freeze my cake balls, but you can refrigerate yours for 3 hours if you have the time. Once they are firm to touch you are ready to decorate.



You can use Candy Melts, from HobbyCraft, which come in all sorts of colours, or normal chocolate - plain, milk or white. The covering in the photos is caramel flavour that I bought at a cake shop.

Melt slowly in the microwave or over a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water.  Once melted the texture should be like runny yogurt. If you need to make it thinner then I suggest adding a tablespoon of sunflower oil to the chocolate or candy melts which loosens the texture.

Dip the end of a lollypop stick into the melted chocolate/candy melt, before pushing it firmly into each cake pop. This will make the cake pop much more stable. Then dip them into the melted chocolate/candy. Coat evenly and gently tap on the side to get rid of any excess coating.

   If you are decorating the cake pops it is essential that you do it straight away as the chocolate/candy melts will harden against the cold cake pops almost immediately.

You can decorate with 100s and 1000s, drizzly chocolate,  Edible Butterflies, sprinkles etc before the chocolate or candy sets.  You can leave the finished cake pop to dry on a baking sheet or you can see from the photo above that I put oasis into a container and prodded each cake pop into it.

I made these little Easter cake pop chicks using small triangles of red fondant icing and poking holes through the yellow candy melts to make eyes. As you can see from the photo of my grown-up brother cake pops aren't just for children!