The Great Cake Pop Disaster

Its taken me two days to get over this enough to write a post about it without feeling depressed... 

Just kidding! I've just been mad busy this week. But in seriousness, I was pretty bummed that my first adventure into Cake Pop-land was an epic fail. 

Over the weekend I had picked up a book on making cake pops by Molly Bakes. I had always thought that making cake pops required special baking molds and patiently watching the oven so that you put in the sticks at the right time etc. I wasn't entirely wrong I suppose as that is one way of doing it but the book I had taught another easier way of doing it: bake a cake like normal then crumble it down. Make frosting and add tablespoons of frosting to the cake crumbs until the mixture becomes like a pliable dough. Pop it in the fridge for an hour so that the mixture gets a bit firmer and then you're ready to mould the dough into little balls or whatever shape you desire before decorating.

Sounded easy enough so off I went, baking a basic butter cake and making vanilla buttercream frosting. I crumbled down the cake and added the frosting until it became (what I thought) a pliable dough. 

I put it in the fridge for a few hours before taking it out to form little balls of cake. 

After that, I was supposed to put it in the fridge for about 15 minutes before decorating. The book recommended using Candy Melts for decorating and went on extensively on how to melt down the candy and lots of decorating ideas. Basically, the idea was to use the candy melts to coat the ball of cake such that the candy would cool and form a shell around the ball, keeping the shape. 

I went out and bought the Candy Melts for this purpose. The book suggested microwaving the candy to melt it down. On my first attempt however, this resulted in me burning the candy melts (I had bought white colour candy... it  was brown when it came out of the microwave and hardened into a crisp lump)  so that lot got thrown away. Using my own judgment, I decided to double boil the candy instead to melt it down. 

This worked much better in terms of melting it down but it never quite got runny enough for me to dip the cake ball in it effectively to coat it. It was more of a sticky mess :(

Anyways, the first step was to dip the sticks into the candy and then into the cake ball and to let it set for 1 -2 minutes. 

After it had set, I was supposed to dip the balls into the candy to coat them completely but as I mentioned, it did not work for me because the candy just was not thin enough and my attempts in dipping led to my cake balls falling apart and sliding off the sticks... resulting in a big cakey, gooey mess. 

:( :(

I think there were two things that really went wrong here.... the first might have been that my cake mixture was too gooey itself. I think I ought to have had less frosting in the mix so that the dough was firmer. Second, the candy melts didn't get thin  enough. I need to do more research on getting it to the right consistency.

I will probably try this again at some point, when my bruised ego has recovered. Today though, is my big baking day of baking red velvet cupcakes for Nic's colleague's wedding. I'm off to colour my fondant to make pretty little decorations!