Cake Pops

This was my first go with cake pops. I have seen them around, but have never really given them much thought until i saw a post yesterday by Cupcake Kelly over at An American Cupcake in London. I looked at them and thought 'that looks neat', so i decided to give them a shot.

Now, i am not going to call my attempt an utter failure, but neither am i calling these the next big thing to come out of my kitchen. At least until i get a lot more practice, and patience, with the dipping part. I started, in my opinion, with the lazy way and ran down to the store for a cake mix and a container of icing. I whipped up the cake at about 8 pm last night and let it cool. Meanwhile, i took to the internet and got a few ideas. There are some pretty neat cake pops out there. Here is my cake, it didn't brown so well but it passed the toothpick test, so i pulled it. Because it was a plain white cake mix, i added a large tsp of vanilla when i was mixing it. 

After letting the cake cool for a few hours, i crumbled it into my large mixing bowl. Here is where i was starting to think wow...this is a lot of cake. I mixed in a bit of leftover cream cheese icing and then most of the full container of the same that i had purchased earlier. This is my bowl of crumbs after scooping out one pan full. 

I used my new cookie scoop to measure them onto cookie sheets, and then rolled them into balls. I got sixty-two, that is a lot of cake balls! By now, i am thinking these folks that sell them for 2 and 3 dollars a pop must be pulling a great profit for the small hassle. It cost me only four dollars for the cake mix and icing, plus about a dollar for the 3 eggs and maybe about 5 for the chocolate. That is 10 dollars. If i make 62 and sell them for two dollars each, that is 114 dollars profit!! Yikes! I am seeing dollar signs, especially since it does not appear that anyone sells them in my city (that i can find on Facebook and Kijiji anyway). By now, it is 11 pm, so i threw my balls in the fridge and went to bed. 

The clock rolls around to 4 am and i wake up...and can't get back to sleep. So at five i crawled out of bed and decide not to waste the time and start dipping. All i had was green chocolate, and a tiny bit of white left over from Christmas. I melted those together over a makeshift double boiler. All the recipes i found for cake pops said to dip the stick into the chocolate and then stick it into the cake, so i did this. I only had about 35 sticks and 62 61 cake balls, so i decided i was going to make the rest into chocolates. 

Finally, i started dipping. I had about 4 fall apart in the chocolate, and none turned out very pretty. I had to alternate between cookie sheets as well, sticking one back in the refrigerator after it got to warm and continuing with the next. I don't know if the chocolate was to thick, but i had it everywhere. I tried to stick them into an upside down egg carton to dry, but the chocolate dripped down the sticks and all over the place. Aside from standing with them over the pot for a full five minutes, there was nothing i could do; i decided to give them a sprinkle of heart shaped candies for something to sit on so they would not get a flat top (didn't work).

These supposedly freeze well, so i think instead of dipping the rest, i might freeze them until i can get more sticks and get some more practice. They turned out edible, but definitely not sell-able. So while i am not going to get rich off of these, at least not yet, it was a good try. Aside from the dipping,  I enjoyed making them, and i know my friends and family will enjoy eating them. That is, if they don't take one look at them and run away  :-) 

As they say, 'if at first you don't succeed, try try again'. So i think i will get some more sticks and take another whack at it.