Cake Pops for Geoff's Birthday

Happy 24th Birthday to Geoff!

 We decided to give the Philly Phanatic a balloon :)

The idea for this banner is actually from the TV show The Office;
I didn't know if Geoff would remember that it was but either way, I knew he'd appreciate the humor in the lack of excitement and the formal tone that it takes. 

So this afternoon Geoff came over for birthday dinner and for desserts, I decided to try...

CAKE POPS.

So I thought I'd give some instructions and tips for those of you who have considered trying them out

Materials Needed: Cake Mix, Frosting, Candy Melts, Lollipop sticks.  Optional: Styrofoam, sprinkles, cream cheese

Step One: Bake a box cake as you normally would.

Step Two: Once it has cooled, break it up into crumbs.  I did this by cutting it into squares and scraping the pieces and crumbs back into the KitchenAid.  Then I mixed it on and off with the whisk attachment to break up the big pieces. 

Step Three: Once the pieces appeared to be relatively even, add frosting and mix until you get a good enough consistency to roll it into a ball.  You don't need too much, and unfortunately I don't even know the measurement of how much I used. 

Note: I've heard that you can add part cream cheese-part frosting to the mixture to make it not as overwhelmingly rich.  

Step Four: Using your hands, roll the cake mixture into even sized balls.  The cake mix that I used made about 35 cake pops.

Step Five: Melt the chocolate candy melts as instructed on bag

Step Six: Individually dip the end of the lollipop stick into the chocolate and then place insert into a cake ball.  You want the stick to be about 1/2-3/4 of the way through the ball.  As you can see from the picture, the chocolate will form a little ring of chocolate around the stick and the cake.  This helps the stick and the cake stick together better.

Step Seven: Dip each cake pop into the chocolate so that it is completely submerged.  You should have enough chocolate to be able to do this in one dip without having to scoop more on with a spoon or spin it around in the chocolate.  Adding too much chocolate from scooping, twisting, or turning will make it so that the cake will most likely fall off of the stick

...As you can see, I ignored this step the first time.  My solution?  Put the chocolate into a tall glass instead of a bowl so that you have more depth to work with.  Worked like a charm. 

Step Eight: After dipping the cake, lift from chocolate and gently tap the lollipop stick on the side of the glass, while slowly turning the stick.  This will allow for the excess chocolate to drain off and form an even coating.  

Step Nine: Once the extra chocolate is off you have 2 options.  For a more flawless and rounded finish, stick the end of the lollipop stick into the Styrofoam to allow to dry.  If you don't have Styrofoam, they can also dry laying down, but as you can guess, the wet chocolate will form a flat edge against that surface.

Step Ten: Adding sprinkles- If you choose to add sprinkles to your cake pops, you must do it at the right time.  

-Adding the decorations immediately after dipping will be too heavy for the wet chocolate and pull the coating down.  

-Don't wait too long though because apparently the top hardens  first and you'll result in this balding look...

 -You need to wait until the chocolate coating is in between hardened and wet. This generally does not take too long.  Here's one that turned out pretty well.

The reason why most of these just have green sprinkles on them is because I decided to try Mint Chocolate dipping candy.  I wanted to be able to tell them apart from the super rich ones that I didn't care for quite that much.  The mint seemed to cut the richness down a bit and I'd suggest it for sure :)

Anyway, that's really all that I can think of on this for now.  If you have any questions, let me know! It was quite the experiment, pretty fun if I do say so myself! Give it a try :)