How Many Bites Does It Take To Get To The Center Of A Cake Pop?

I am not the kind of person who is good at being trendy.  I think it goes back to when I was 12 and my Mom would not buy me a pair of Guess jeans.  It was a time when the right jeans could actually advance you into the next social sphere and I wanted them, like, really bad. They were just too expensive, too tight fitting, too un-Catholic and a million other reasons my Mom would invent every time I asked. Instead, she bought me a pair of jeans called No Name.  She thought that was hilarious.  I felt sick.

I was pretty sure Jesus wanted me to have fancy jeans and all the glory they would bring.  I remember once at a slumber party, we went around the room telling each other what other people said behind their backs.  I was told I had ugly clothes and shoes.  I learned how to make it work for me, though.  While friends shopped at the mall, cute and fashionable in their Camp Beverly Hills t-shirts and brand name jeans, I shopped in thrift stores and wore old men's clothes and combat boots.  I thought it was hilarious.  My Mom felt sick.

You can't read Martha Stewart Living, go to a kid's party or even run into a Starbucks these days without seeing cake pops.  They are omnipresent and really trendy.  Like Snooki or that Old Spice guy.  I was smug in my outward distain of them.  I am not normally so snobbish toward any dessert.  I can really get behind a frozen Ding Dong or one of those scorching McDonald's apple pies and I have been known to put my whole face into a bowl of cotton candy.  If it tastes good, I'll eat it (if it looks like a delicious, pink pillow, I'll put my face in it). But something about the cake pop rubbed me the wrong way.  They are so in your face with their diminutive cuteness.  They are so delightfully compact.  They are what unicorns and fairies eat.  They somehow make me feel old. They also make me want to punch someone in the face.

I have been on fire with my baking the past several months.  People call me and jokingly ask me what I'm baking that day and I usually have an answer for them. I've stockpiled so many ingredients that I have candy melts and sprinkles of all sorts in my bedroom closet.  I baked my way through cakes, pies, cupcakes, brownies (oh the brownies!), tarts, cookies and the list goes on.  I couldn't believe it, but I was actually getting tired of the usual suspects.  Even my friends would protest that they didn't need another loaf of banana bread.  I was becoming a baking drag.  I was troubled by this.  I really needed to find some new recipes or, gasp, get a job.  Since the latter was still not materializing no matter how hard I tried, I decided I needed to think outside the bundt and find me a new muse.

I was online one day reading one of my food blogs and saw photos of some really pretty cake pops.  I was wondering how you make them. I mean, they are little balls of cake.  How do they hold together?  How do you get them so round and plump? So I clicked on the recipe and was intrigued by the answer - you mix the frosting and the cake together and roll them into balls!  I was slightly repulsed and yet it was kind of genius.  I needed to try it for myself and see if it was delicious, or if it was some weird, edible arts & crafts project that you might do in Kindergarten. Either way, the spark was back!

sifting cocoa powder

First, to bake a cake.  I read lots of recipes for cake pops - some called for a box of cake mix and pre-made frosting, others for a rich red velvet cake from scratch and a fancy boiled buttercream.  The cool thing about these pops is that you can use virtually any cake and frosting recipe. I didn't think this experiment warranted a whole bottle of red food coloring, and making a complicated frosting seemed silly for such a whimsical little treat, so I went with a super dark chocolate cake recipe and a vanilla cream cheese frosting.  You don't need to bake the cake in cake pans because, wait for it, you cool it and then grind it up in a food processor!  This was definitely more on the Kindergarten side of the spectrum, but I was game.  And if it didn't work out, I'd just eat some paste and call it a day.

chocolate goodness

This was a HUGE cake!  It was kind of agonizing waiting 3 hours for it to cool completely.  Then I cut off all the dry edges so all that was left was the decadent cake belly.  The cut off edges went promptly into my mouth and I'll be damned if it wasn't a super tasty cake.  Then I cut the cake into chunks, put them in the food processor and pulsed until it looked like chocolate bread crumbs.  It was definitely weird putting a cake in the food processor.  I thought it might turn into a big ball of goo, but it turned into nice, uniform crumbs.

mixing cake crumbs and frosting

My favorite cake combination is the super chocolatey devil's food (whose name comes from its super dark color, although I tend to think it's because only the devil could make something so delicious that I will eat it until I'm disgusted and very repentant) and vanilla frosting.  I will definitely eat the hallowed chocolate cake/chocolate frosting double whammy with reckless abandon, but the vanilla and cream cheese cuts what can sometimes be an overwhelmingly rich chocolate-on-chocolate extravaganza.  There is a sort of appealing restraint in not going double chocolate.  Another hot tip:  choose the appealing restraint of NOT putting your face in a bowl of cotton candy when given the option.

When mixing the choco-crumbs and the frosting, it seemed like it was just going to be a globby mess, and it was, but it tasted good and the frosting incorporated well.  It seemed like the white frosting might turn the dark chocolate cake to an unappetizing gray color, but the mixture was super dark.  I liked sneaking the frosting into the cake so that it was the full cake experience.  I used a cookie scoop, which looks like a baby ice cream scoop, to make sure my cake pops were all the same size.  Then, with clean hands, I rolled them into balls and placed them on a cookie sheet covered with parchment.  I was kind of grossed out by having to manhandle each cake pop.  I was hoping the people who ate them didn't think too hard about how they got so round.  Sort of like, as a vegetarian, I try not to think about how they are probably cooking my veggie burger on the same cooktop that was used to cook a big juicy hamburger.  I was able to make 75 cake pops from one recipe!  Into the freezer with my little balls for a half hour until they had firmed up enough to withstand the sticks and the dip into melted chocolate.

live nude cake pops!

While the cake pops were chillin', I melted some semi-sweet chocolate over a double boiler and cooled it slightly.  Once the pops were frozen, I gently inserted 4" lollipop sticks, which I got at Michael's.

sprinkles!

I was a little nervous that the cake balls would fall off the sticks as I dipped them in the chocolate but they didn't.  I dipped those suckers, all 75 of them, in chocolate and rolled them into a dazzling array of different sprinkles and then froze them again for about 15 minutes so that the chocolate set. Voila!  Cake pops!  And they were gorgeous!  They looked very fancy and professional.  I was pretty proud of myself.  I tried one and it was really good.  Very chocolatey, nice crunch of chocolate and sprinkles and the hint of cream cheese frosting made it taste mysterious and complex.  When Aaron came home, I presented my cake pop spectacle with much pageantry.  He wasn't buying it.  He wanted to know if I touched each one and why they were so dense.  I guilted him into trying one with my trusty boo boo lip routine, and he said they tasted good, but it was definitely not his favorite of my baking oeuvre.

The good news is that everyone else loved them.  Since I made so many, I gave them to all my friends, my friend's kids, the gardeners, the mailman, my doctor, my dental hygienist and I took them to several parties.  Also good news, they freeze really well and defrost perfectly in about 10 minutes.  I've gotten more squeals, more big smiles and more compliments on these darn pops than on almost anything else I've made, so even though they may not be husband-approved, I declare my experiment a success.  For my birthday, my friend Kirsten even got me a professional "cake pop" maker, so I guess that is a hint that I should keep making them.  You don't have to touch those, so maybe Aaron will even come around.  I still have never bought a pair of Guess jeans, but these cake pops are one trend I think I can get behind.

Oh, and by the way, it takes one bite to get to the center of a cake pop or, "A One," as the owl in the old Tootsie Pop commercial would say.