Getting showered pt. 2: How not to make cake pops

While I don't consider myself a cook in the slightest way, I am a teensy bit handier when it comes to baking.  Of course, I'm not talking pies from scratch or anything like that, but even I can't mess up cake-in-a-box.


For the Dallas shower, I wanted to try my hand at cake pops and give them out as favors to our guests.  As usual, I turned to the internet for a good and easy recipe.  Incidentally, I love the internet.  I can find almost anything I need and I don't know how I survived before Google.  If it's not online, it doesn't exist.  But back to the cake pops.


Cake pops and cake balls are apparently the new 'it' dessert so there are tutorials all over the internet, just a tiny Google search away.  I found one pretty quickly and it seemed easy enough so I went for it.  Now, I know my limits and had zero intentions of trying to decorate them or put little designs on them.  I was going to do well just to get them made and it turns out, I couldn't even do that.


This is my PSA and this is the recipe that I followed.  You can either tell me what I did wrong or you can read what I did so the same thing doesn't happen to you when you make cake pops, which I totally recommend because they're not that hard.  And you know if *I'm* telling you it's not that hard, it's for real not.

First, make a cake.  I wanted the cake to be pink, because

although I didn't want it in the nursery, I'm not opposed to it in cake.

Once the cake is done and cooled, crumble it up and mix it

with a 16 oz can of cream cheese frosting.

Then you roll them into balls and put them in the freezer for 'several' hours.  I hate when recipes are vague like that.  I need precision!  I put them in the freezer from 10am until 2pm, thinking that would be enough and I would be able to assemble them before our party at 3:30.  I was wrong - apparently, 'several' means more than four.  I took them out but they warmed up pretty quickly and started falling apart when I tried to coat them with the candy melts.

My plan was to have the white exterior, pink interior and

covered in pink glitter.  They were going to be so cute!

I even got some cute ribbon on sale at Michaels!

Alas, the cake pops were a bust and I had no favors to hand out at the shower.  I felt bad but Brittani and Kesha reassured me that it was okay and nobody would be mad at me.  However, I had all these cake pops in the freezer and I certainly wasn't going to eat them all!  So, Sunday night Drew helped me and we finished them so I could take them to work Monday morning.

Even though they were firmer than they were on Saturday,

they were still pretty soft.  Was it the can of frosting?

Did I mess up somewhere else?  I don't know.

So, you dip the lollipop stick in the melted candy and stick them in the cake and then cover the cake ball.  Once the candy is hardened you dip the cake pop in the glitter.  I had it in a bowl but found that putting it in a baggie was much easier to control and you get better coverage, hence the uneven-ness - I was learning as I went!  Once you've done that, you put the pops in a sheet of styrofoam to store them.  Then you put the wrapper over it, tie the ribbon and you're done!  It went much faster with two people and you don't even need to refrigerate them when you're finished.

I got everything at Michaels - 

anything crafty you can think of, that store has it!

My glitter application wasn't precise and I ran out of

the baby carriage ribbon but it's not bad for my first try.

Man, I wish I'd finished these before the party!

This is definitely not a one-day thing!

Trying them before I take them to work.

Holy crap they're sweet!

Like omg, sugar shock sweet!

I like cake, but holy hell!

No, they're good, I swear!

I don't know what I did wrong because I followed the recipe to the letter.  The candy coating didn't have much of a taste to me, although Drew said it was pretty sweet.  The cake was strawberry, which wasn't too bad and the frosting was cream cheese so that shouldn't have been that sweet, right?   But there was something about all of them together that would send you straight into a diabetic coma!  I really want to try them again, maybe with a less sweet cake like carrot cake or banana bread-like cake.  They were also super moist, almost mushy so I wonder if I shouldn't have used the entire can of frosting.  Maybe they would have stayed together if I'd used only half the can?  Maybe if I used a moist cake mix I wouldn't have to use frosting at all?  I'm just not sure.  I'm brainstorming what to bring the nurses when we go to the hospital but since these should really firm up overnight, that's a tiny bit of a challenge since of course I don't know when I'm going into labor and I'm totally cool with that.  Or maybe they don't have to firm up overnight if I use less frosting - I really don't know where I went wrong but these were way too sweet for my taste.  They were also too big - they almost didn't fit inside the wrapper but I didn't want dinky cake pops!

Anyway, I took them to work the next day and they were all gone by lunch.  There's something about the break room and free food - even if it tastes like crap, they'll take it.  At least no one came back to me and complained.

Now this is what cake balls are supposed to look like!

I'll tell you where they came from in a minute!