Cake Pops

This weekend, we had dinner with some friends. I saw it as a perfect opportunity to practise my cake decorating. (Plus, let's be honest--I was craving chocolate cake.)

Well, it was also the first chance I'd had to make a cake using Bertha, my new KitchenAid stand mixer. Well...I got a little excited, and used the wrong attachment on Bertha when making the icing. It was lumpy, no doubt about it.

I tried putting the cake together, anyway. I even got as far as putting a crumb coat of icing on it and letting it set up in the fridge overnight. But I just couldn't do it.

So, I took the opportunity to try something I've been wanting to try for a while now: Bakerella's Cake Pops. Check out her awesome blog for the actual recipe; I simply took my cake, scraped off the offending lumpy icing, and mashed it up with some nice, non-lumpy chocolate icing.

Then I formed the chocolatey goodness into balls (some were too big, in hindsight) and stuck them with lollipop sticks. My cake pops took a chill in the freezer to firm them up:

And then they took a bath in melted candy melts (Wiggle Man wanted "poopah" melts). I should have kept the melted candy and chocolate warmer; you can see this one didn't coat as well as the ones behind it.

And some dark chocolate. ("The chocolate coating makes it go down easier." Actually, these went down pretty easily, thank you Valerie.)

I ran out of chocolate and candy melts, so I thought I'd use up some white chocolate. I think the cake pops had been out of the freezer for too long and weren't as firm as they should have been:

Sadly, Wiggle Man and I had to eat this poor cake pop ourselves. Just to, you know, make sure they tasted ok.

Yup.

Wiggle Man was a little confused by the cake pops (he couldn't tell if they were ice cream or cake) but definitely enjoyed eating them. I wish I'd gotten a picture of him chowing down on his poopah cake pop.

Cake on a stick. What a grand idea. Thanks, Bakerella!