Cake Pops .. trials and tribulations

Ok, so I decided to try my hands at Cake pop's again.  I managed to get the Craftsy "The Wilton Method: Creative Cake Pops - by Valery Pradhan" on sale.  I don't know about you, but I am always on a budget as I don't do cake decorating full time (my dream for the future is to open a small business doing speciality and custom cakes and cupcakes).  The Craftsy platform has been a fantastic way for me to learn new tips and techniques at a price I can afford, in my own home - so I don't have to travel or miss work to do a class.  They have wonderful courses available, and often have sales.  Being from South Africa with a very bad $ - Rand exchange rate (normally $1 costing me over R10), at least with their sales, I can afford to learn.  I am self-taught mainly and would like to give a HUGE thank you to all of those people out there that post recipes, tutorials and video's on how to do things online.  If it wasn't for you, my life wouldn't be as enjoyable. There really are some incredible teachers in South Africa, but again the travel, timing and price often come into play in a big way, so thank you bloggers, teachers and all those that share. 

I spend a huge amount of time online, searching for recipe's, tutorial and the like.  Pinterest has been a great help as well as obviously Youtube and facebook. I think I have thousands of tutorials and recipe's saved or printed out and just don't get the time to try them all out.

So back to the cake pops.  While these deceptively simple looking little mouthfuls of yumminess seem so simple and logical to make, they can provide a huge challenge.  I have tried many of the combinations online, but always seem to have problems.  Some suggest mixing crumbled cake with vanilla (or choice of flavour) essence, till it becomes firm and sticks together.  Others suggest using ganache, buttercream, milk and all other kinds of ideas.  I have tried buttercream and essence, but not with what I would call a huge success, and I WILL master them - hence the class... 

So the class advised using 2 x 8" (20cm) cakes with 1/4 - 1/3 cup buttercream icing.  Obviously me being me, I didn't have that and wasn't going to bake just for that, but I had a 4 cm high 30cm x 24cm rectangle vanilla cake that has been in the freezer for a while and it was time to either use it or get rid of it - I was running out of space again - and I decided to use it.  I made some scrummy cream cheese icing and crumbed the cake.  As I didn't know the exact amount of icing to use - because as usual I was rocking it MY way and didn't have the proper cake size - I just kept adding 1 tablespoon of icing until it was a consistency that when I squished it and rolled it into a ball, it held it's shape and didn't crumble or fall apart. I used an icecream scoop to measure the size of mixture to roll and made balls with the mixture. I've learned from experience you should use the same size or weight to ensure a uniform end result.

I then put them on a baking tray with baking paper and put them in the fridge for 2 hours.  When I was ready, I melted some white chocolate in the microwave. (I use Geldhof Belgian white chocolate because the factory shop is not too far away and it tastes fantastic).  I messed around with colours until I got a kind of vintage dusky pink colour that I liked.

I then took my balls out of the fridge, took plastic sucker sticks, dipped them into the chocolate and then pushed them into the cake pop, smoothed around the join (when you push the chocolate covered stick into the cold pop, excess chocolate pools a the top leaving a little lip) with my finger and put them back in the fridge for a bit.

I then reheated my chocolate a bit (I don't have any fancy chocolate warmers unfortunately) and started dipping.  When I had done about 5 or so, I realised that most of the first ones were cracking!!! WTBleep!  

So back to asking my trusty "Master Google" as I call it and read a few posts to find out why cake pops crack. I always read a couple to make sure, and if there seems to be consensus, I'll take the advice.  So from my very clever online experts out there, it seems that when you cool (freeze or put in the fridge) the cake pops, they obviously contract as they cool, and then as they warm up they expand again slightly and this causes the cracking. The other thing that seemed to come up a lot was to watch the temperature of your chocolate, if it is warm and your cake pops cold, it the chocolate cracks as it cools too quickly.  

The suggestions seemed to advise: 
a) Make sure your chocolate is cool, and if necessary add a few drops of oil (sunflower or another tasteless oil) to help keep it liquid for longer; 

b) Only work with two or 3 cake pops at a time and as soon as you are done, put them back into the fridge (rather refrigerate and don't freeze unless you are only going to work with them at a later stage, and then defrost before dipping by letting them defrost overnight in the fridge); 

c) Check for air bubbles in the chocolate and pop them yourself to ensure even coating.

This worked quite well until I realised that the ones that cracked or had a bubble in the chocolate coating that I hadn't popped were leaking a bit. I mean CUMMON!!

So back to Master Google and it seems like it is a very common problem, and the only remedy is to ensure that you cover them properly the first time, which keeps all the moisture inside.  A few sites mentioned that the mixture shouldn't be overly moist, but just holding together.  I will try this next time. I can't very well take out the icing I had put in, and they were all ready to go.  So I just kept on going, doing a few at a time and making sure that I kept them refrigerated in between. 

I even went as far as to re-dip the ones that had cracked. This actually worked better than I thought.  You will never get a perfectly smooth pop after cracking but at least it's all sealed and and doesn't have an ugly crack showing - and stopped leaking! I was mostly satisfied with the end result. So onto decorating them.

There a millions of pops out there of different shapes and sizes.  I'm just doing plain old upside-down ones this time.  The first ones I added some "gum glue/ sugar glue" to in a kind of swirl pattern and then whilst still wet, sprinkled sugar over the wet glue.  I did the same sort of thing for the stars, but used sprinkles instead of sugar.  The bird cage style I piped some royal icing on and then dusted some pre-made pink flowers with the same sort of mix I had used to colour the chocolate.  

Here's the end result .. I'm pretty satisfied with them. 

These were decorated by my 12-year-old daughter Sandy.  I often have to "fight her off" when I'm decorating cause she loves to be creative - especially when you can eat it afterwards!!!

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Love

S