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.
