It all started on
Saturday, November 23, 2013 – When Tara ran her Cake Pop class. And I learned how to make cake pops. And got to decorate some cake pops at the school.
I’m a fan of “cakie monster”.
As it turns out, individually decorating cake pops is a lot of work. So even though I made 7 pretty little cake pops, if I were to make them in bulk, I’d probably dump sprinkles on the cake pop while it’s still slightly molten. Like the one with the hearts.
I also discovered that my phone can edit photos with funky filters. So I did this:
Saturday, November 30, 2013 – Time to bake my own cake pops. I decided to make a 5X Chocolate Cake Pop, with chocolate cake, binded with chocolate frosting, mixed with chocolate chips, coated with a chocolate shell, and topped with chocolate sprinkles. Because why do when you can over-do?
In any case, it starts with cake:
I’ve been developing a cake recipe for a while, but I decided to go back to basics because, let’s be honest, I’m not a fan of my current recipe. And by basics, I decided to go with “pound cake plus milk”. (But I used half a pound of every ingredient instead of a full pound, so I guess it’s a “half-pound cake plus milk”.)
As it turns out, creamed butter and milk don’t mix very well, even with a bunch of eggs. Next time, I should add the milk and eggs even more slowly and mix them in gradually. (You don’t want to see a picture of creamed butter, milk, and eggs. Well, maybe not until the cookie tutorial.)
Also, people say you shouldn’t use convection baking for cakes. So I decided to try it. Nothing bad happened. If anything, it baked faster than before, so clearly I should do this more often.
Lastly, the cake was a little on the greasy side. I should decrease the amount of fat. Except since I’m using butter, I can’t decrease the butter easily. So I’m gonna increase the other ingredients. Here’s the recipe I would try next time:
2 sticks butter
240g brown sugar
240g milk
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
220g cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp kosher salt
40g cocoa powder
Sunday, December 1, 2013 – The next step was to make the frosting, used as a binder to make the little cake balls. I used Tara’s Super Secret Frosting Recipe, quartered (about half a stick of butter’s worth of frosting) because I’m making a quarter of the quantity, and I added 10g cocoa powder to make it chocolate frosting.
Crumble the cake and add the chocolate chips (1/2 a bag of Ghirardelli Bittersweet Chocolate Chips, which is about 5oz of chocolate chips), and mix.
And then shape them into cake balls. (No comment.) And chill.
The next step is to coat the cake balls in melted chocolate. Tara recommended Wilton Candy Melts. But I’ll be honest, my favorite kind of chocolate is Ghirardelli. So I got some Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Melting Wafers instead.
So why not just use plain old dark chocolate? Because as it turns out, melting and tempering chocolate and forming it into nice hard candy shells is non-trivial. It’s much easier to get melting wafers. Which apparently replace the cocoa butter with palm oil. Somehow that makes it easier. (I’ll have to ask a food scientist.)
And I said sprinkles, right?
Tara also recommended letting the cake pops cook while sitting in a foam block. These are just dry floral foam blocks I got from Michael’s.
And they look divine.
If you look closely, you’ll see a few cake pops where the stick went all the way through and out the other side. As it turns out, you only want to push the stick about halfway in, not most of the way in like I did. Otherwise, *that* happens.
You might also notice the sprinkles aren’t even distributed. There are two reasons for that. One, a lot of the cake pops solidified before I could get them fully coated with sprinkles. Not sure what to do about that. The other reason is, I only had one bottle of sprinkles, when I clearly needed 2. As it turns out, it’s much easier to coat cake pops with sprinkles if you have a lot of sprinkles.
I had more than enough chocolate for the candy shell though. I used 2 whole 12 oz bags to get the chocolate pot deep enough to dip my cake balls. But I ended up with about one bag’s worth leftover, which I solidified any left in my food closet.
Lastly, I bought a bunch of treat bags and colored twist ties. Alas, the treat bags were too small. Thankfully, I could stretch them out, and no one but me would ever suspect a thing.
