Cake pops

So I was intrigued by this recipe posted by on Facebook  by Skinny Taste today, and decided to try my own version of it. I remembered that I'd bought a cake pop mould online a couple of months ago and had yet to give it a test drive, and today seemed as good a time as any:) 

 I searched online for a while looking for a recipe that suited - I wanted one with less sugar since I knew I would be coating these pops anyway. I found this one by Spark People.

For the recipe, see below. For the long version (with details of my trial and errors with my first attempt at making cake pops...keep reading!

What you're going to need is: 

INGREDIENTS: 

1-1/2 cups unbleached flour 

3/4 cup sugar or other sweetener 

1/2 tsp. Salt 

1 tsp. Baking soda 

3 tablespoons cocoa powder 

1 tsp. vanilla 

1/3 cup vegetable oil 

1 tablespoon vinegar 

1 cup cold water 

Sift the dry ingredients together. Add the wet ingredients and beat briskly with a wooden spoon till smooth.

Spoon into your cake pop mould (mine uses about a teaspoon of batter per mould) and bake. 

I adjusted the cooking time slightly from the original recipe since my cake pops are quite tiny and don't need as much cooking time as a cupcake.

I baked mine for approx 7 mins, turning the mould over halfway during the cooking time. In retrospect, the tuning them over seemed to have introduced air bubbles which made aboout a third of the batch break in half when I opened the mould. The baking time of 7 mins seemed quite perfect this time. 

The result of round 1 looked like this:

Not so pretty, but after I gave one of the broken/air bubble ones to my 2 year old, she came back 10 second later and said "Want more!", so I reckon they tasted ok :) I gave one a try myself and was very pleasantly surprised - soft, full of rich chocolate flavour but lovely and light in texture - winner!

I filled the moulds as full as they could go the second round and let them bake the full 7 mins on one side instead of turning them. After 7 mins - great! No air bubbles. However, the pops were not nearly cooked through so I put them in for another 3 mins. Still not done, so another 2 mins (now 12 mins in total).

For round 3 I filled them as before and baked for 10 mins - just right.

I let them cool then packed them away so that I could coat them the next morning. 

Now for (what I thought was ) the fun part - coating them and making them beautiful!

I  melted a large Easter bunny because that was what I had in my house! 

I dipped each pop in the chocolate and...voila!

 

A broken cake pop, imperfectly covered in chocolate. I couldn't understand it. Why was the chocolate not smooth and drippy like in the tutorials? Mine was thick and sticky. I was sooo disappointed! First I thought maybe I hadn't melted the chocolate long enough, so I turned up the heat to see if the chocolate became more melty ... no. So I searched some more and found here that you need to chill the pops for a bit before coating them, so I popped mine into the freezer for 15 mins.

Slightly better, but my internet research taught me that Easter egg chocolate isn't right for the job so it wasn't smooth and drippy like in the tutorials :(

So I chilled them some more and googled icing (frosting) coatings for cake pops...nada. So I just mixed up my own with icing sugar and milk.

I dipped the pops in them and added sprinkles... but there was no saving them! They looked CRAP.

So I tried again with the chocolate and added some sprinkles to hide the oopsies

Not great, but they'll do.

What I've learned:

1. I really, really love the internet!
2. Not all chocolate is created equal and they can't be used interchangeably.
3. Cake pops made as whole cake balls taste WAY better than crumbled cake with frosting
4. You can't make cake pops quickly - only do this if you have a few hours to devote to the task
5. They taste great regardless of how they look
6. Your kids will love them so they are totally worth it:)