Home for the Holidays Series: This year, local reporters and editors are using the week of Thanksgiving to share our favorite holiday traditions and recipes with you, our readers.
Ingredients:
- Pre-mixed cake batter (chocolate or vanilla depending on preference)
- chocolate melts
- lollipop sticks
- Frosting of your choice
- mint extract (optional)
Addresses:
- Start by baking a cake without frosting. You can use pre-mixed cake batter from a box or homemade.
- Let the cake sit overnight to cool.
- After the fully formed cake has cooled, have fun breaking the cake into pieces into a large mixing bowl. Use your hands to break the cake into an easy to mold cake powder.
- Add the glaze to the mixing bowl and combine until the mixture has a dough-like consistency. For a large cake, this may require more than one can of frosting. Part of what makes cake pops a great recipe is that they can be made to match the baker’s preferences, so feel free to use whatever cake batter flavor and frosting flavor combination you’d like. If you want to create mint flavored cake pops, you should not add more than two drops of mint extract to the frosting at this stage.
- Shape the mixture into balls no more than an inch and a half thick. The thinner the ball, the easier it will be to decorate and the more likely it is to hold its shape.
- Place the balls on a cookie sheet and place the sheet in the freezer for no more than 20 minutes, so the popsicles keep their shape.
- At this point, start melting the melted chocolate. If you don’t have access to melts, you can melt chocolate bars. After melting, place the chocolate in a tall cup or glass. If you are making peppermint cake pops, you should now also add no more than two drops of peppermint extract into the melted chocolate.
- Dip the end of the popsicle sticks into the melted chocolate, then place the stick into the cake balls.
- After the cake is connected to the sticks, dip the entire cake pop into the melted chocolate. It’s easiest to use small cake pops in a glass for this process, as it can be difficult to cover the entire cake pop by dunking it into a bowl.
- After you cover the cake pop with chocolate, use this time to decorate the pops with any frosting or other cake decorating supplies you have.
- Let the filled cake pops stand for an hour with the stick facing up to harden and take shape.
— Contact Brendan Wiesner at [email protected]