Cake pops galore!

Thanks to the Make Lounge I discovered the rather delicious world of cake pops. After assisting on a couple of cake pops classes and with my birthday and Easter celebrations coming on I decided to make my own.

The concept of cake pops is rather simple: bake a cake, crumble it, mix it with frosting, make little balls, put a stick in them and then dip them in chocolate. The result is super cute and so yummy! Both my husband and I fell in love at first bite.

To make my own cake pops, I used a recipe I found in Making magazine. The chocolate cake is dead simple to make, I left it to rest for a day before blitzing it in the food processor. Then I mixed it with the cheesecake icing (which I prefer to buttercream), rolled it in 19 little balls (the recipe should have made 20 so not too far off) and then stuck them in the fridge for a good couple of hours. Once they were cold and hardened, I stuck the lollipop sticks in and we were ready for coating and decorating.

For the coating, I used Callebaut's white chocolate callets. It's Belgian, so good quality stuff, and even for me who's not a white chocolate fan, it's irresistibly delicious. I used the plain chocolate to do a first dip, it's not necessary to do a double coating but with chocolate cake as a base, I find that if you don't, the colours don't look as pretty.

I used the Americolor oil based colourant that the Make Lounge sells to dye the remnant of my callets in seasonal colours: pink, yellow and blue.

The coating took a long time, almost two hours in total! But with a few finishing touches, my cake pops looked amazing!

Most importantly, my guests loved the cake pops. The chocolate cake mixed with the cheesecake icing tasted almost like fudge and the chocolate coating wasn't just pretty, it was scrumptious. The pops would be ideal for kid's parties but they're a perfect size for adults too. And for someone like me who'd much rather have chocolate than buttercream, they're so much nicer than cupcakes!

I can't wait for an excuse to make more!