Christmas Cake Pops: How to make them with kids and survive ( just)

I think that these cake pops need to come with a health warning, there is no guarantee that you will survive their completion with your sanity intact, in fact there were moments during the construction of these that I wondered if we were seeing the emergence of a new phenomena; Cake Pop Induced Psychosis. You see the thing about these tiny little things is that you see them all over the interweb looking so cute and well easy....a bit of cake, smooshed and rolled up dipped in chocolate covered with some sprinkles, easy peasy right.

Well, they are not difficult exactly, more like involved and  time consuming, and you add in the baking with children component, which is like herding ants at the best of times, and the  degree of frustration increases, significantly. 

But I don't want to put you off too much, in the risk/benefit analysis performed after the event I have concluded that it is likely that the pleasure my children experienced from being a part of making these and subsequently giving them out to their friends cancelled out the psychological damage they experienced by being in the same room as their cake pop demented mother.

So here is how we did it.

Putting the red in red velvet.

1. The first and most important thing I have learnt from making cake pops is to have a plan, know what you are attempting to make ahead of time and work out the sequence in which you are going to do it. Cake pops is no spur of the moment Sunday afternoon baking activity. I decided to use red velvet cake as the base for the cake pops, after seeing Yule themed, drool inducing, red velvet cake pops all over Pinterest.  The cake needs to be made well ahead of time, I chose this recipe after browsing some online. The only reason I chose this one was it was the first one I came across that had butter instead of oil and you really need the firmest cake possible for the construction of cake pops.

2. Decide on your decoration schema and get those children to work, I did have an original plan to make only Rudolph pops, a la Bakerella. These are very involved little blighters and need lots of prep work ahead of time. We bought a bag of mnms and my tribe had a most enjoyable time sorting out the red noses for Rudolph. For the antlers I bought a bag of mini pretzels from Count Down and cut them in half ( this is harder than it sounds, every second pretzel shattered under my knife blade!) and for the eyes, again I got those children color separating. I had a jar of Wilton Christmas themed sprinkles and they sorted out the white, Ben then used a black food marker to put a black dot in the middle of each one to create reindeer eyes. We also used a some candy cane sugar sprinkles that I had in the back of my baking cupboard ( you could easily achieve this by smashing up some candy canes), a jar of Wilton Christmas sprinkles and some red and green sanding sugar, these I got from a little cake decorating shop that I am lucky enough to live around the corner from, but you can buy all these and more from an online store like The Pretty Baker.

3. Smoosh your cake, I was not working to any set ratios, and my cake had matured in the tin for a couple of days, I used one tub of cream cheese to each cake pan. I was most grateful to my kitchen assistant Ken at this point in the proceedings. He makes short work of cake smooshing.

4. Melt a small amount of chocolate, clear a space in your fridge and line a tray with some baking paper.  Then begin to roll your cake into balls. A few months ago I did purchase a cake pop mould from TM but I think these are unnecessary, I like to go a bit free form with the cake balls. With clean hands I roll them into little balls like play dough and they seem to work out roughly uniform. Dip the top of your cake pop sticks into the chocolate and then into the cake ball. Place them upside down on the tray and then put them into the fridge to firm up.

5. After an hour or two you can start decorating. I find this the trickiest part, I used chocolate melts with a bit of kremelta mixed in to help the chocolate set better. Still I had lots of trouble with dripping chocolate. There is a narrow window waiting for the chocolate to be set enough not to drip and not so much that you can no longer attach things to it. At this point there is a lot of standing and holding dripping cake pops, luckily I have three assistants that were happy to be cake pop holders for me. I'm not going to lie though, this part is very frustrating and more than one Rudolph lost his nose. It was at this point, staring down the barrel of making fifty cake pops that I decided that there was no way there would all be reindeer pops and I went the quick dunk in chocolate and scattered in sprinkles route.



6. Next I put mine in the fridge to set. It is very important that you have prepared space ahead of time to accommodate them. The fridge part is problematic, in the heat of December in my hot and sticky little kitchen they really needed to chill in the fridge, but the chocolate does tend to sweat and Rudolph will lose some colour from his nose, I am not really sure how you get around this.

Yes that is florist foam I used to stick them in, it works quite well but polystyrene is probably optimal, having something to stick them in as you wait for them to set is ESSENTIAL. You might also be surprised to know I don't work for Lisa's hummus but we do eat a lot of it!

7. Just when you think you have done the hard yakka, there is one more thing left to do. Carefully package your cake pops up. Ours were intended as a gift for each of the boys classmates on the last day of school. It is kind of a catch twenty two, in order to preserve ultimate cake pop presentation your really need to package them as close to the gifting as feasible. However, it is possible that at 7 am on the morning of the last day of school when you also have to take your daughter to her swimming and ballet lesson, is not the optimal time to be performing such tasks. Having said that though, the boys took real pride in their packaging and I  think they might have enjoyed this part more than any of it.

8. Sit back and admire your hard work, you did it! and enjoy watching the excitement of your children's classmates and the pride on your kids face as they distribute their gifts.

9. Vow to never make cake pops again and decide next year I am buying a bag of candy canes from the Warehouse.

Things I learned

The business of cake pops is an involved and messy one, when I arrived home on distribution morning, after aforementioned ballet and swimming lesson and last day jubilations, I was greeted with a house that literally looked like a bomb had gone off in it! This could owe more to my actual organization skills than the cake pops though.

Make sure you have enough time and patience to under take this venture, the morning after two procedding days at work  and then up til 4am with a sick three year old is probably not the best time, but sometimes there is no choice in these matters.

That Red Velvet cake is probably too moist for cake pops in December, if I made them again I would go back to Anabelle Langbein's Ultimate chocolate cake, it is the perfect recipe for cake pops.

Melting chocolate is hard work, next time I will try using Wilton moulding candy to see if this makes things any easier.

Cake pops is an excellent  baking activity for children. The Pediatric OT in me could not help doing a mini task analysis in the kitchen, there are so many components to this task that make it good for learning.  The planning and sequencing of the task, the fine motor skills involved in sorting the decorations, hello pincer grip! hello in hand manipulation with rolling cake balls. I have concluded cake pops are probably the just right challenge, difficult enough to make you doubt yourself, but leaving you with a great sense of pride and accomplishment at the finish.