Saturday, February 12, 2011

Spring Chicks Cake Pops

I made the Spring Chicks Cake Pops from Bakerella's Cake Pop book. I decided to take pictures along the way. I used a boxed cake mix - the book says that a boxed mix is the right consistency. It is also easier and faster to make a boxed mix. (This is a picture of the box along with the cake before I put it in the oven.) Here is my cake fresh out of the oven.
I forgot to take a picture of the cake crumbs. That part was harder than I thought. How hard should it be to turn a cake into tiny crumbs??? I think my cake was too moist...or something. Maybe it was the kind of cake mix I used. A food processor would work much better for this job than your hands, but I don't have one, so it was a very long and messy process.
This is a picture of the cake crumbs mixed with the frosting. I was almost done rolling them into balls when I remembered to take pictures!
I thought I would try and do something a little different... I tried to smush some of the cake into one of my candy molds. I know that isn't what they are for, but I thought it was worth a try. Please take my advice... don't put the cake directly into the mold. Fill the mold with chocolate and then put the cake in. Maybe even spray it will Pam or something first. I had a VERY hard time getting the cake out of the mold. Problems included ruining the designs the mold made in the cake and cracking a mold trying to get the cake out. They make silicon molds for this reason.
Here are the cake balls in my fridge.
The chicks use little "kisses" in yellow and orange. It is something that you can buy, but I didn't have any, so I made my own. The orange is more red because I didn't do a great job combining colors to make orange.
A close-up of my "mini kisses".
Here is a picture of what the Spring Chick pop is suppose to look like...
Here is a close up of the candy pieces you need (per the book).
Here are the pops on sticks.
It is a lot harder than you think to make cake pops. Well... let me rephrase that. It is a lot harder than you think to decorate cake pops. I couldn't get the melted yellow chocolate to be smooth on the pop. So, I covered a few of the lumpy ones with some of the sprinkles I bought a few weeks ago.
Another view of the lumpiness... A close-up of the nonpareils.
I used some of the heart sprinkles to make a face.
I didn't have any flower sprinkles to use for the chicks feet, and I wasn't sure how to make something like that. So, I omitted them. I think they are cute!!
The more I covered, the smoother the coatings got.
Overall, they look super cute and are pretty tastey! They are a little sweeter than most adults like, but they are good. They were slightly more difficult to make than I thought they would be. They are VERY time consuming!! I still have about a dozen in my fridge that are waiting for a coating of some sort. I know for next time to allow more time to make these...especially if the design is anything more than a melted chocolate coating with sprinkles. Hopefully you try them!! The possibilities are endless for the designs and combinations for the cake pops. :)
Thanks for reading! :)

3 comments:

  1. I love this post! I've read quite a few that just go through the steps without mentioning any problems encountered. I now know that it's going to take me a lot longer than anticipated - maybe we'll do this over 2 days! And that double-dipping the balls might be the best bet to avoid lumpiness. We're just going to decorate with sprinkles and melted chocolate, so I can skip the decorating troubles (thank goodness!) Oh, and I plan on using the kids to crumble the cake. I think that, since you had some problems with it being too moist, I might try baking it a little longer - it might reduce some of the moisture?

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  2. Thank you! I try to make sure I tell what I thought works / doesn't work. It helps me the next time I make them to try something differnt. I haven't had a chance to try them a second time. My 1 year old thinks trying to climb up the oven door is a fun game. He's into everything right now,and since this isn't something that I can do over naptime, I haven't given it another try yet. If you find something that works better (or worse) I'd love to hear about it. :)

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  3. I used to make these a lot. They never turned out perfect but people still seemed to eat them. I signed up to make some for a shower this weekend and they didn't turn out the way I wanted. I thought they looked awful but my mom said they looked really great. The chocolate/candy coating didn't melt the way it was supposed to and they never look the way the pictures do of ones I've seen on the internet. I'm supposed to make some pumpkin/fall ones for my daughters class this Friday. Still not sure how I'm going to use it. It definitely takes A LOT of time to do. I do think that yours turned out really cute. Much what they should.

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