Cake Pops!

I've made these delightful little things a couple of times now, but this will be my first time posting. I promised my coworkers that I'd make some Easter cake pops and instead of doing the cute animals featured on bakerella.com, I opted for just doing Easter eggs as they'd be quicker.

So, let's begin. First up, bake a cake, any cake, that strikes your fancy. I'm a fan of a simple white cake, so that's what I made. To make it a bit more Easter-like, I added some pink food coloring:

I think next time I do these, I'll dye the cake different colors and bake it in 2-3 round pans, just for more variety in the pops. Once the cake is done and cooled completely (don't mess around with this part!!), crumble it up into a big bowl:

You may have to pull off some of the corners that browned a bit much, but don't worry, this will make a lot of cake pops even without those corners. Next up, add your frosting of choice. It's about 2/3 of a regular recipe of frosting (to frost top and sides of two 8" cakes). You don't want to use too much frosting, the last two times I did this I messed up and it made them fall off the sticks and required much more refrigeration. You only want enough to bind it all together, no more. Don't worry, you won't miss it! I used cream cheese frosting.

Once it's all stirred in, it's time to get your hands dirty. Pull some out and make it into a ball (or, in this case, an egg shape). I use about enough to make something a little smaller than a golf ball. If you make it too big, it will fall off the stick...and while it may seem like there's not enough cake in there, there is.

Spend the next 20 minutes making many!

Then prepare the remainder of your ingredients. Candy melts (I used half a bag of three different colors) with about half a teaspoon of shortening in each half-bag to thin it out just a bit...and a bunch of lollipop sticks. I think a half a bag of candy melts is about 7 oz of chocolate, so you'll need about 21oz in total. You can also use real chocolate, you may just have to use more shortening. You want it to be relatively thin, otherwise it won't get smooth on the pops.

Once it's all melted and you've let your cake pops cool for about 10 minutes in the fridge (to bind them together a bit more), it's time to start putting them together! First, to put the sticks into the pops, it works best to put a little candy on the stick before inserting it into the pop.

Put it in about a third of the way through the pop:

Do that for all of them, the cool cake pops from the fridge should harden the candy relatively quickly so you can move on to step #2 as soon as you're done inserting the sticks.

Next up, start dipping them in their colors. You could use enough candy to dip them completely, or just use a spoon as I did to cover them. Either way works. Once you've coated them completely, tap and spin them gently to get off any excess chocolate (you don't want dripping all down the lollipop stick!). I will add a word of warning here: if you let them cool for too long in the fridge, they may crack the chocolate as they warm up and expand. So you want to only cool them enough to get them to harden up a bit, but not enough to be completely cold. Play with it, even with cracked chocolate they're super cute!

Stick them all in some styrofoam - $2 from Michael's - to dry. These aren't perfectly smooth, I obviously need to make more to perfect it.   

If you want to add sprinkles, I'd recommend doing it while the chocolate is still wet. I didn't do that, so had to re-dip several of them.

Then, enjoy! They're very moist and delicious in addition to being cute.

Jetlag Cupcakes

So originally, I'd intended on making some hi hat cupcakes as described here but realized upon arriving at home that I only had 2 eggs left so that put a wrench in my plans. Instead of going to the store (I just got back from Japan, I don't want to leave my house!!), I changed my idea.

I started with some cupcakes. The primary complaint I have with cupcakes is that they tend to dry out relatively easily. So to combat this problem, I find oil-based cake recipes. I also needed one that would only require 2 eggs, where most require 3. Fortunately, I found one. 

 I also thought it'd be cute to put some colored chocolate chips in there. This was a dumb decision that I blame on the fact that these were made at 3am (jetlag, how I hate you!). Because I used an oil based batter instead of butter, it was much thinner...and they all sunk to the bottom. Plus, the cake is so dark brown that you couldn't see the colors. They were cute in the box, though!

All baked and ready to go! Don't they look tasty?

I made some buttercream icing but instead of using milk and vanilla to flavor it, I used orange juice and orange extract. Orange and chocolate goes well together, right? Made it in three different colors, got all of my pieces together (I used tip #352 for the leaves/petals and some random star, prolly ~17 for the center):

I need to work on being a better photographer, I think.

First, start with a few leaves. I'm in no way an expert piper, but cupcakes and the people who usually eat my stuff are very forgiving, so here we go:

 Next up, add the yellow. I somehow managed to have two 352 tips, probably an accidental purchase not realizing I already had one, which made this much quicker to do as I made the frosting a little soft and needed to keep cooling it off in the fridge. So I could rotate.

Aww, look how cute it is! Starting to look like a flower! Sorta. A friend of mine stopped by tonight and he didn't really see the resemblance to flowers but I shushed him.

Then, add a little bit of brown. I should've probably used a clean piping bag instead of putting it in the green one, but I'm lazy.

The beautiful finished product:

A basket full of sunflowers! Of course, I'm well aware that sunflowers are a summer/fall flower, not a spring one...but if you can think of a way to pipe a daffodil onto a cupcake, I'd be all ears! :) Now, my friends, it's time for this jetlagged girl to head to bed.

They're quite delicious, by the way. :-)