Bakerella Does Cheesecake, Too

If you haven't joined the Bakerella cake pop cookbook giveaway frenzy, you still have a few days. Just click here and leave your name and reason for wanting the book and we'll announce the winner on Monday.

In the meantime, I am going to lure you with Bakerella's baking wonderfulness with this photo of her fabulous chocolate cheesecake bars. I may not be able to make a perfect cake pop, but I can make cheesecake and these things were sinfully good.



You can get the recipe here. Make them. Now. You know you want them.

The Bakerella Cake Pop Cookbook Giveaway!

Regular readers know Rachel and I are fans of Bakerella, the Cake Pop Queen. We first wrote about her as a Blogs That Make Us Hungry feature here and last week, I publicly embarrassed myself chronicling my own cake pop flop here.

But my failure as a cake pop star should not be taken as the norm. If you love Bakerella and desperately want to learn how to make cake pops in your very own home, this could be your lucky week. Just leave a comment with your email about why you want to make cake pops and we'll choose one lucky winner to receive Cake Pops, Tips, Tricks and Recipes for More than 40 Irresistible Mini Treats from Chronicle Books. My own inadequacies aside, the book is filled with helpful directions and pictures to ensure that you are a cake pop star and the envy of all you see. Let the giveaway begin!

The Cake Pop Fiasco

Rachel: As promised, I took on the Bakerella cake pop phenomenon this past weekend and it was pretty much a disaster. But let me start at the beginning.

As I noted in Friday's post, I am a Bakerella fan and was thrilled to get a copy of her new book, Cake Pops. Now, finally, I could recreate her wondrous confections right in my very own kitchen. I, too, would become a cake pop star.

I wisely didn't start with the jack o' lantern cake pops. I figured I'd hone my skill creating some basic cake balls and then take it up a notch with the actual cake pops.



As you can see, the cake balls went fairly well. Emboldened by this success, I forged ahead on the cake pop path. I noticed that I only rolled about 30 cake balls when the recipe said it would make 48, but I figured how much of a problem could that be? The answer became readily clear with my very first cake pop — or should I say cake plop.


As you can see from the cake pop sitting in the icing rather than on my stick, this is one case where size does matter. If your cake pop is too big, it becomes too heavy when the icing is on it and it falls off the stick. It wasn't long before I had my own little cake pop graveyard going.


Undaunted, I persevered. Overall, my icing was too thick so I added some canola oil as Bakerella suggests; it worked okay but not great. Where her lovely photos show her gracefully swirling her little cake pops in lovely candy coating, I was glopping mine on and trying like hell to keep them on the stick. (Next time I'm definitely getting those little crystals she recommends for thinning the candy coating.)

My next challenge came with drawing the faces. I had bought some food coloring pens. In a word, they sucked. Although my cake pops were anything but smooth, I think I could have pulled off their mutant shapes a bit with better faces. Instead after a fair bit of swearing at the pens, I gave up after three. The photo shows why this was a smart move on my part.

Maybe I should just stick with cake balls.

Bakerella's Surprise

The weekend is coming and I am home with lots of time so I've decided to dedicate a fair amount of time to cooking, specifically baking. I've long wanted to enter Bakerella world — Rachel and I have a shared obsession with Bakerella, the originator of the amazing cake pops. We love her blog and regularly worship there, so I thought this would be the perfect time to try to make one of her fabulous cake pops. We have some friends whose children have a birthday this weekend, so what better gift for them than cake pops? I mean, just look at these cute jack 'o lanterns from her book?

I've had a copy of Bakerella's new book, Cake Pops, from Chronicle Books on hand for a few weeks but have been waiting for exactly the right moment to open and learn the secret of these marvelous little sweets. Tonight, after a ridiculously stressful week of work, I decided to treat myself and open the book to see how the magic happens so I could get any ingredients I need to make the cake pops.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

The foundation of cake pops is ... box cake mix. And the frosting is ... ready-made.

I have to admit my jaw dropped.

To be fair to Bakerella, who is clearly a talented lady, she clearly says all over her blog that she uses box cake mix. But I just always got so tied up in the visuals of her clever little cake pops and goodies that I actually never noticed it before. So while I have nothing against using box cake mix, I just assumed everything was from scratch (I know, I know, I know what they say; if you assume, it makes an ass out of u and me) so this box cake mix thing just ... surprised me.

Once I got over the shock (clearly I'm a cooking snob since I just assumed everyone of her talent would do everything from scratch), I got kind of excited. The creation of these cake pops is going to be tough enough for someone like me who is, um, artistically challenged. I don't have to add tons of baking-from-scratch time to my agitata. I can just toss together the cake mix and spend all my time on the artsy part.

Stay tuned. Monday's post will show the fruits of my labors, no matter how ridiculous they look.