Pi is Good But Pie is Better: Cake Pop Update and Cake Related Gifts :D

Hey everyone!

I haven't felt the urge to blog in a few days but I am finally getting round to it :) I am at home now with the family and have been up to Flamborough for food and a walk with my sister. I am sooo tired now though after all that sea air!

So I attempted cakepops on Wednesday/Thursday. And it is a lot harder than I thought it would be. There are so many parts to the process and its very time consuming.

I began on Wednesday night by making a cake. I made a small chocolate cake in a 19inch cake tin. I then left this to cool and bobbed it in the fridge over night.

The next morning I put the cake in a food processor to produce crumbs, I then mixed these with a combination of icing sugar and cream cheese to produce a moist mixture. I did think the recipe that I used did not use enough cream cheese which meant the mixture was slightly crumbly and caused problems further on. Next time I will use more cream cheese. I then weighed out 1 oz onto the digital scales and rolled it into a ball. I repeated this and put then balls in the fridge to set.

That afternoon I melted white chocolate in a bowl in the microwave and took the balls out of the fridge. I then dipped the end of a lolly stick into the chocolate and inserted it into a ball and dipped the ball into the chocolate to cover it. I then used sprinkles to finish it off. I did this for all the cake balls :). However, I found some of the balls hard to cover and they crumbled off the stick whilst in the chocolate, I think this was for a number of reasons:

1) As mentioned before there was not enough cream cheese in the mix.

2) The balls warmed up and began to crumble, so it might be best to only take a couple out of the fridge at a time.

3) The chocolate sets very quickly so can get sticky and gloopy and be hard to apply to the pop. Next time i'm going to keep an eye on the consistency and put back in the microwave if necessary.

Although some did not turn out excellent , a few were pretty good and here are the results:

Cakepops with sprinkles

Russian Doll Cakepop, decorated with food colouring

Cake pops 2

As you can see I also used some strawberry chocolate for some of the pops. Its made by Silverspoon and can be found in Sainsburys in the baking aisle. I also have some orange flavour. It is quite expensive though at just under a pound for 100g (you need around 500g for 20 pops). They are quite hard to store once made. I got a small cardboard box and put holes in it with a skewer.

I think that I will be giving cake pops another go. I find that if I aren't totally happy with something, I will keep trying. I am hoping to be able to post pictures of some more successful pops in the next month :). I will be doing a tutorial of the basic method and techniques in next weeks TUTORIAL TUESDAYS post so something to look forward to!

On another note my sister has bought me a couple of cake related things whilst I have been away:

The first is a cool cupcake display/carry case which fits a single cupcake in. The bottom part of it is a silicone mould which can go in the oven. The top part is hard see through plastic lid which twists on. This means that you can ice the cupcake creatively and the casing will protect it. I think it would look amazingly cool in my lunch box.

The second present was a 100 piece cupcake decorating kit including icing bags and nozzles. These sort of nozzles look to be best for intricate designs and writing. The set also includes number and letter stamps which can be pressed into regal icing and then provide outlines to follow with icing. It also includes some other stencils in fancy shapes.

See the pictures below for both: