Cake Pops- The good, bad and ugly...

This blog post is all about cake pops! I was in the process of planning a baby shower for my work colleague, the theme we were using for the baby shower was grey chevron and yellow so I found on pinterest a picture of cake pops I wanted to try to replicate (see picture below)

my work colleague ended up having the baby early, but I had already bought candy melts and grey stripped straws from NY Cake & Baking Company, anyone in the NYC area should definitely go check out that store since its baking heaven. Since I already had the supplies I decided to make the cake pops anyways. This time to make the cake pop making process faster I wanted to try using munchkins as the base for the cake pops. I did some research on tips for making cake pops and found this blog post, which mentioned putting 1/2 teaspoon of shorting into the candy melts in order to get a smooth chocolate coating on the cake pops, which was an issue for me in the past (you can see the photo evidence below).

I got the munchkins from Dunkin Donuts and started making the cake pops by first adding shorting to each color candy melt 

                                           

Once I melted the white chocolate I dipped the grey stripped sticks into the white chocolate and then into the munchkins

Then I put the cake pops into the refrigerator to give the white chocolate a chance to harden. While the cake pops were in the refrigerator I melted the rest of the candy melts, the yellow candy melts burned a little bit.  I'm not sure why that happened to only the yellow candy melts and not the green or white candy melts. I kept adding shorting to the candy melts in order to get them to the perfect dipping consistency.   Then  I set up my decorating station with the melted candy melts, little candies and the melted white chocolate in a squeeze bottle so I could try to drizzle chocolate like the cake pops in the picture on the top of the page. 

After I took the munchkins out of the refrigerator I got to decorating the cake pops and it definitely did not go as planned. Some of the cake pops started falling off the sticks and I had a lot of trouble getting the melted chocolate to cover the entire munchkin. I also wasn't able to get the white chocolate drizzle to look pretty. You can see a picture of the final product below. 

This experience taught me I'm definitely not skilled in the field of pastry arts and cake decorating, but its always fun to try different baking projects. Stay tuned for my future cooking and baking adventures :)