Cake Pops = Fail!

Yesterday during my lunch break I stumbled across the blog of Bakerella and I can't believe what I've been missing!! Bakerella is super talented and the inventor of Cake Pops. What are Cake Pops, you ask? Well they are balls of cake covered in chocolate and placed on sticks, lollipop style. You can form the balls into a multitude of shapes and decorate them a million ways. Here are some examples from Bakerella's site.

She also has a Cake Pops book that has officially been added to my Christmas list!

I was so excited to make my own cake pops that I went to the grocery store on the way home from work last night to pick up ingredients. The balls are made from a mixture of cake and frosting. You bake a cake mix as directed on the box, let it cool completely and then combine it in a bowl with a can of frosting. Then you form your mixture into balls. Sounds simple, right? Well maybe I should have taken it as a sign when my cake overflowed all over my oven that things were not going to turn out well but I continued on anyway. Step One was pretty easy and in hardly any time I had rolled my mixture into balls.

So far so good but it was getting late so I decided to refrigerate the balls and head off to bed. Fast forward to tonight. I had my chocolate and my sprinkles all ready to go. I melted two 50g Jersey Milk bars in a measuring cup thinking it would be the easiest container to roll the cake balls in. Did I forget to mention that I hadn't bought any sticks so my cake pops had turned into plain old cake balls? Oops. Pops or balls notwithstanding, I quickly discovered that way too much chocolate was sticking to each piece and I couldn't figure out how to get the excess off without making the chocolate look all messy. My two chocolate bars went really fast and, in the end, I only managed to cover 8 balls. Obviously not right at all!

I think that the ones I did manage to cover look (and taste) great but I need to figure out a way to spread the chocolate out better. I was pretty frustrated by the time I finished my 8 balls tonight so I packed the rest of the cake up and put it back in the fridge to try again tomorrow night. Stay tuned!