Making the Cupcake Pops
Last night I took on a practice project. I’ve been wanting to make Bakerella’s Cupcake Pops for quite a while. You probably haven’t heard of Bakerella (or maybe you have!) but she’s quite popular in the blog world for her fabulous and creative baked creations.
Her cupcake pops are also popular on wedding blogs since they make adorable little gifts for shower hostesses or a yummy favor. So, I was very excited when I found out there was need to host a baby shower for my preggo cousin. I volunteered to make the desserts and I knew it had to be cupcake pops. Baby cupcakes at a baby shower? Oh yeah.
But I heard that they are pretty tricky to make and require practice to get them just right. Last night seemed like a good time to practice.
We begin by baking a regular cake, letting it cool and then crumbling it all up:
It is suprisingly fun to crumble cake.
Then the crumbled cake is moved to a mixing bowl and combine with almost an entire can of frosting:
Mix until its all good and sticky. But not too sticky. Just moldable sticky:
The next steps I didn’t take photos of. I was too busy swearing at the cake mix and yelling about what a pain in the ass this is. It is in fact a huge pain in the ass. I recommend a few drinks before you get started.
The unpictured steps include rolling the cake batter/frosting mix into ball. You put the balls on a cookie sheet and freeze them for 20 minutes. Then you take them out.
Then you push them half way into a flower-like shaped cookie cutter. This makes the bottom look like a cupcake wrapper and mounds up the top to look like a cupcake top. Kind of. Except that its a massive pain in the ass. I’m told it just takes practice and you eventually get the hang of it. Or, you could be smart enough to only make these once. More on that later.
So once you balls look like cupcakes you melt yourself some chocolate candy melts and you get to dipping your cupcake bottoms in the melted candy. Then you insert a candy stick:
Once they dry, you melt a different color candy melt – I picked pink. And you dip the tops to create the appearance of pink frosted cupcakes. You can add sprinkles or whatever you like:
Look out, the cuteness is coming.
Props to Zac on that last photo and the next one…I left the camera on manual and with zero knowledge of what he was doing, he snagged some nice photos!
So here is a finished cupcake pop. You are supposed to stick them in styrofoam to let them dry. I don’t have any styrofoam laying about my house. I did have an empty soda carton and knife. Worked just fine.
I know. Charming isn’t it? Probably the cutest baked good ever.
Let’s look at them in all their cuteness, shall we…
…and here they are posing in a glass…
So adorable. Can’t you just picture dozens of them on display in assorted glass vessles, all ready to bring cheer to baby-shower guests? Well don’t picture it, it ain’t happening.
For starters, I bit into one when I was finished. It was gross. Zac insisted it wasn’t but I didn’t believe him. I decided to give it another try tonight and I ate one. MUCH better! Yummy even. Not delicious. But yummy enough.
The yummy factor, however, is not nearly high enough to outweigh the pain-in-the-ass factor. I started making the cake at 8 last night. I finished the cupcake pops at 11. In 3 hours I got 12 cupcake pops. Yeah. Simply not logical. Looks like the baby shower will be serving regular mini cupcakes. That’s still cute and I won’t have to be hauled off in a straight jacket in the process.
Trust me, if I think a recipe is too much work, it is. Last summer, I was hellbent on making raspberry cream cheese frosting from scratch using real raspberries. This requires the raspberries be pureed and the seeds sifted out. Trouble was, I didn’t have a food processor or even a blender or anything capable of pureeing raspberries. Nor did I have seeve that was fine enough to remove raspberry seeds.
So…I cut the foot out of a pair of panty hose and stretched it over a wire strainer. Then I pushed the raspberries through it one at a time so that the puree made its way into a bowl and the seeds stayed atop the panty hose. It worked. It was the best frosting I have ever made.
THAT was easier that making these cupcake pops. And the finished product was way more delicious.
Just a note…I have since purchased a blender and can puree my raspberries in a socially acceptable manner. So if you happen to be served a cupcake with that frosting…no need to worry that it was made using my panty hose : )
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