Cake Pops…do you love them? I’m not a huge fan. It’s a texture issue for me. The ones I’ve had have either been like mush or dry and tasteless. My second Caking Kiddo on the other hand LOVES them. A couple of weeks ago, I taught a cake decorating class. I torted and filled all of the cakes ahead of time for the students, which meant I had quite a few cake scraps lying around when it was all said and done. I really didn’t want to just throw them away so Caking Kid 2 and I had an idea to try to make some cake pops. Turns out, they were actually quite simple to make (and they weren’t mushy or dry), so we thought we would share them here with you!
First off, we took those leftover cake goodies and tossed them into the bowl of our mixer and using the paddle attachment, gave them a good spin. This gave us a finer crumb to work with. We added around 1 cup of buttercream to that mixture, and it gave us just the consistency we were looking for to roll it into balls. Not too mushy and not too dry, and they held together very well.
After we rolled them, we popped them into the freezer for about 15-20 minutes, so they could firm up just a bit. During that time we got our candy melts and sucker sticks ready. Once we pulled the cake pops from the freezer, we dipped the ends of our sucker sticks in the melted candy melts and inserted them into the top of the cake pops. This helped “glue” the sticks in place so they wouldn’t slide off the cake pop when we dipped them.
That step took a bit of time, so we put them back into the freezer for just a few minutes afterwards to make sure they were good and cold for dipping. We didn’t want them to fall apart in the warm candy coating when we dipped them. The dipping is probably the funnest part of all. 🙂 We used a combo of white and orange candy melts and topped some of them with sprinkles for good measure. Sprinkles make everything better! 🙂
As a finishing touch, I took a little bit of buttercream and green gel color to make a nice shade of green to add some leaves and vines to the pumpkin cake pops using a small leaf tip and small round piping tip. Perfect! Such a fun and easy treat to make with those leftover cake scraps and buttercream! Not to mention, they are pretty darn cute. Who doesn’t love a sweet little pumpkin…and sprinkles? 😉 If you don’t have cake scraps lying around like we did, you could easily just bake your favorite cake recipe in a sheet pan and use that for your pop filling.
Go make some memories in the kitchen today!
‘Caking Mom and Caking Kid 2