How to Find a Husband: 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!