Turning 30 - a good reason to make Cake Pops!

And there it is. As a friend of mine called it: the "evil 30"! It's my birthday today, so instead of crafting I was busy making cake pops this weekend.

My sister told me about cake pops and how easy they are to make. When I started googleing and browsing amazon I realized how many people already know about cake pops! And as it is custom to bring breakfast to school on your birthday, I decided to make some cake pops for my colleagues. (Cake pops derive from the word lollipop, i.e. cake balls on a stick!)

A colleague lent me her cake pop form and a book full of recipes. Unfortunately all the recipes where based on American ingredients and the recipes I liked had ingredients that I couldn't find in our stores. So I picked 3 German recipes: Coconut, Baileys, and Black Forest Cake.

For the coconut and Baileys cake pops I bought ready made light cake. (They sell those over here and you only have to cover them in fruits if you want to make a fruit cake. ) For each flavour I cumbled 400g of cake into 75gr of butter, 175gr of cream cheese, and 150gr of powdered sugar.
For the coconut flavour I added 3 tablespoons of cocnut milk and 125gr of rasped coconuts. The Baileys balls got 5-6 tablespoons of Baileys mixed into the dough.
Then you mix everything well together until you have a sticky mass of dough. Form dough balls of about 3-4cm and put them in the freezer to cool them down and make them a little harder. (The original recipe suggested the fridge, but for me the freezer worked better.)

While the cake balls are cooling, melt chocolate until it is creamy. I used white chocolate as base and melted some brown and pink chocolate for decoration purposes.
Take the balls out of the freezer and start putting them on sticks. You can either buy plastic lollipop sticks online or use wooden sticks from the store. Because the balls were so heavy I had to use two wooden sticks per ball. Hold them over the pot with the melted chocolate and use a spoon to let the chocolate over the cake balls. If the cake balls are really nice and cool the chocolate will dry faster. Decorate them as you wish with more coconut bits, sugar pearls, nuts, or whatever you like!
I then stuck them on a plate of styrofoam that I had wrapped in aluminum foil to let them completely dry.

 

Making the black forest cake pops is very similar. Instead of light cake dough I used 400gr of chocolate cake dough (of course you could bake the dough yourself if you don't want to use the ready made dough). I crumbled it up and mixed it with butter, cream cheese, powdered sugar, and 4 large table spoons full of sour cherry jam. The recipe also suggests to cut up dried sour cherries, but as I got the jam that had cherry bits in it I used the dried cherries for decoration only. Then proceed as previously described!

And voilá!