Cake Pops!

Groupon and Living Social can be a great thing. Through them, we’ve found some fun cooking/baking classes. Plus, you get to try something new for a discount price and who doesn’t love that?

Last night was a Groupon class on how to make cake pops! Held in a small local commercial rental kitchen (never knew there was such a thing!) I learned, like everything else in the culinary world, it takes PRACTICE to decorate a cake pop! This was the set up when we arrived.

There were eight of us in class and the first thing we did (after washing our hands, of course!) was to crumble the prepared cake at our stations.

We mixed in a small tablespoon of prepared cake frosting into the crumbs to give it some moisture and to act as a binder for the cake balls, then kneaded it like bread dough until everything held together. To create the balls, we took a pinch of the dough and began smashing it back and forth between our hands to get it soft like play-dough, then rolled them! It’s a lot like rolling meatballs. :-)

There was a lot of discussion about different techniques to make cake pops. You can free roll the pops or use a pop pan. Some people refrigerate or freeze them before dipping, others (like us) just go for it!

To put the cake pop on the stick, we cupped a ball in the palm of our hand, dipped the end of the stick in a little bit of chocolate to help it stick to the cake mix, then gently pushed the stick through the ball. TADA!

We even learned how to make shaped cake pops! Though those are harder to get the stick in. You need a very steady hand.

After the balls were stuck (HAHA!) it was time to dip! There was white chocolate and milk chocolate available. The milk chocolate was much easier to use. We dipped the pops into the chocolate then held them up and tapped our hands to get the excess chocolate to drip off. This step takes patience!! When you think you’re finished, you’re not. The instructor shared a tip with us: if you get air bubbles in your chocolate, you can just pop them with a toothpick!

We each filled three little muffin liners with an assortment of decorations for our pops.

Here is how mine came out!

We learned a few basic decorating techniques – twirling and piping! For twirling, you raise a spoonful of chocolate and twirl the pop under the chocolate as it drips off the spoon. For the life of me, I could not get this technique down. Mine came out with thick lines instead of thin pretty ones.

Here is how it should look!

To pipe on your pop, we learned to cut a VERY SMALL corner of a plastic bag filled with icing and use it to put on the lines. Again, this takes practice and patience.

Those were obviously NOT mine! We had some talented people in class. Here are some of the cake pops the other students made.

Here is MY creation! I can’t help it, it makes me smile.

I have a new respect for cake pops. They are a time-consuming process! I never realized how much work goes into them until I tried it myself. I don’t know if I’ll make cake pops on a regular basis, but knowing how to do it is kinda cool!

Enjoy!!