Lessons in Cake Pops

For starts, I'm a 24 year old teacher, living on my own and loving it.  I was raised in Hendersonville, North Carolina, lived in Columbia, South Carolina for five years while attending THE University of South Carolina and now I have found myself in St. Petersburg, Florida.

 I was raised a small-town southern girl, and I like it that way.

I love to cook.  I love to bake.  I tend to be a creature of habit, but now and then I'll step out of my tiny kitchen of a box and try new things.  Since I've lived in Florida, I've tried so many new things.  One of my coworkers suggested I blog about my kitchen trials, kitchen errors and kitchen successes.  So, here goes nothing.

I suppose there is no better place to start than the present.  Tonight I tried cake pops for the first time.  Holy cow.  Having never made them before, I decided a $9 Black Friday cake pop/donut hole maker was the way to go.  By the way, I've already decided it was a good investment.

Getting started was super easy.  I decided I would go with the basic red velvet cake in a box and cream cheese icing (most definitely not homemade- which makes me cringe).  It took me about four minutes to make the cake batter in my fabulous mixer (another great Black Friday find).  I poured the cake batter in the machine and was off to a great start. It took five minutes to bake six cake pops.

 One box of cake made about 50 cake pops.

Then came time to ice and sprinkle the cake pops.  Hmm...

I've iced plenty of cakes and cupcakes.  I have never iced a little ball of cake.  So, I tried an icing spatula - fail.  I tried a spoon - fail. I tried to look up ideas online - fail.  All suggestions I found wrote about using melted chocolate or white chocolate to dip the cake pops in.  That, I did not have. I had a can of icing.
My next brilliant idea was to pour the icing in a Gladware storage container, drop a few pops in the icing at a time and shake it up.  Suprisingly enough, it was the best idea yet.  Once icing was covering all sides of the pops, I stuck a lollipop stick in the cake, pulled them out of the icing, sprinkled on some red sugar and stuck them in the freezer.  Why the freezer, you ask?  I have no idea.  I thought it would make it easier and a bit less messy to gift/eat.

I have drafted a few teachers to try the finished product tomorrow.
What will I change for the next time?  I WILL NOT use cake icing.  I will use Almond Bark.  It may be a bit messy, but the pops will look better and it will be much easier.