Cake Pops

Today I thought I would share my first attempt at making cake pops. One night when I was having trouble sleeping, I was in the mood to bake so I thought i'd give cake pops a go. After looking at a few recipes on the internet for some guidance I took the essentials and adapted them to what I had in the cupboard/ what I fancied making. I decided on all chocolate pops, that meant chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, chocolate coating and chocolate sprinkles. If your not a fan of chocolate you will not like these.

To start I made my basic chocolate cake which I use in most of my chocolate cake recipes. For this I creamed together 200g of butter and 200g of caster sugar. You need 2 eggs and 200g of self raising flour. Alternate between adding small amounts of the beaten eggs and self raising flour at a time. Add a little vanilla extract, a dash of milk and 3 heaped tbsp of cocoa powder. Mix togethe and spread into your cake tin. Cook at 180 on a fan assisted oven for about 30 minutes or until springy to touch. It doesn't matter what tin you bake it in as once it's cooked it will all be crumbled up.

Whilst the cake is cooking you can make the buttercream so that it has time to chill for a while in the fridge. Mix butter and icing sugar together along with some cocoa powder. Mix until you have a smooth and creamy buttercream. Once the cake is cooked and had time to cool, crumble it all up until it almost resembles breadcrumbs. If you don't want the crispier edges of the cake in the mix then cut them off before.

Making sure not to add too much, add a spoonful of the buttercream to the cake crumbs at a time. You don't want the mixture to be moist as the cake will probably quite moist already. You still want the texture to be a little crumbly but with the ability to hold it's shape.

Shape the mixture into rolled balls, if they are not holding their shape then you will need to add a little more buttercream to the mixture. Once all of the cake balls are ready, allow them to chill in the fridge for 20-30 minutes.

Melt your chocolate and dip your sticks about 1cm into it, then insert the sticks into the cake balls about half way through. Now you are ready to dip the cake balls in the chocolate. Make sure that the bowl with the melted chocolate is deep enough to completely coat the cake ball. You could use proper lollipop sticks but I didn't have any of those so I used halved kebab sticks instead, they worked just as well.

Whilst the chocolate is still wet you can decorate the cake pops with any sprinkles you like. I chose white chocolate stars and some chocolate crunchy balls. Once decorated, pop them in the fridge to let them set. You could spend a long time making them perfect and identical but I took more of a random approach by literally sprinkling the decorations on. My chocolate cake pops are far from perfect but they are rather yummy!

If you don't fancy the cake pops, why not try my Ultimate Chocolate Cake which I posted about a few months ago. Or do you have a better recipe for cake pops which I could try?

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