Cake Pops

In preparation for my baby shower today, last night my mom, Adriana and I decorated the cake pops. I can't take credit for making them. My mom was organized and made them prior to the decorating stage. She made three different flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate and Lemon. Fortunately, for the sake of this post, I was able to find out how she made them.

1. The first thing that you have to do is bake the cake. You can either do this from scratch or you can use a boxed cake mix.

2. Once the cake is finished, you let it cool and break it into small pieces.

3. In order for the cake to stay together in perfect little balls you have to stir in the frosting and then form balls out of the cake.

4. If you're not ready to decorate the cake balls you can store them in your fridge in an air tight zip lock bag.

Quite easy right?

My job - choosing how I wanted the cake pops to be decorated. I flipped through my moms book on how to make cake pops that she picked up at Michael's and chose my favorite cake pops for inspiration.

I really liked this vintage style cake pop because they weren't tacky looking (as some baby themed things can be). The pastel colors made it appropriate for a baby shower.

For supplies my mom picked out all sorts of sprinkles, fondant, food coloring, sticks, and meltable chocolates. She also made sure to have a rolling pin for the fondant and small cookie cutters to create decals buttons out of the fondant.

I divided up the store bought fondant which is also very easy to make but it just seemed much quicker and convenient to use the premade fondant (and I found it to be more pliable.) I slowly added just a drop of food coloring to the fondant. I was careful not to put too much because the color I was trying to achieve was a pastel color and food coloring can be very powerful if you use too much.

 After my colors were made I rolled out the fondant on parchment paper (wax paper would work too) and began cutting out decals with the small cookie cutters from Michaels.

 Once all my decals were made my mom heated various colors of chocolate in tall glasses deep enough for dipping the cake balls into. Adriana attached the cake balls to the sticks and dipped them into the chocolate. To get a smooth texture it is easiest to twist the cake pop as you remove it from the chocolate and then tap the glass with the stick to remove any excess chocolate. I applied the decal buttons. You have to be quick about this because if the chocolate cools then you won't be able to get the decorations to adhere to the cake pops. You can also add sprinkles. Once the cake pops are finished you stick them into a styrofoam bases to allow the chocolate to cool and harden without ruining the design.

 Once they're completely cooled you can put into treat bags and tie with a twist tie!

Isn't my mom so creative!  I'm so fortunate to have her. It's getting late! Time to get ready for the shower and enjoy these sweet treats!