Cupcake Cake Pops

I found myself alone on Sunday afternoon, a very rare occurrence I hasten to add…I enjoy tinkering around the kitchen on my own – so what to make in the allotted ‘me’ time?
I figured if I tried my hand at making cupcake cake pops, whether they succeeded or not, my children, married ones included, would no doubt eat them all up. And anyway, even more importantly, I’d enjoy making them for them.
This time I used two small chocolate chip loaf cakes which I bought from the supermarket especially and a tub of Betty Crocker’s chocolate frosting. The loaf cake is crumbled up into, er, crumbs…and then most, but not all, off the tub of frosting is mixed in. I did kind of realise as I was rolling the balls up, that the mixture was a little softer than last time, but carried on regardless..next time I’m going to add the frosting much more slowly and stop as soon as just enough is incorporated so that the cake balls are nice and firm.
To make cupcake cake pops, a small flower cutter is needed (missing on my ‘Secret weapons’ pic, because, er, it’s not a ‘secret weapon’..it’s in the recipe!
The cooled cake pop mixture is shaped into a cylinder and kind of pushed through and at the same time, molded on top to form the cupcake’s dome. I found this step quite difficult because my mix was not firm enough, but again, carried on regardless. I don’t know if it was because the mix wasn’t firm enough, but I didn’t really have enough indentations round the ‘paper case’ part of the cupcakes to make them realistic, so….enter my secret weapon. A chopstick!

My Secret weapons

I used the tapered part of the chopstick to great effect and went round each and every cake pop making the indentations deeper.
The round plastic things in the photo are great for cake pop makers – nip round to your local sweet shop and beg, borrow or steal (well, maybe not steal) the lids off the containers that they buy their lollipops in! They work really well to stand the cake pops up in.

Cupcake Cake Pops

I strayed from the recipe here, the bottom of the cupcake should have been dipped in chocolate, but I just thought maybe that would be a ‘sweet’ step too far, so I left that bit out and just dunked the top of the ‘cupcakes’ in vanilla candy melts and decorated with sprinkles.
These really needed to be stored in the fridge, because they softened far too quickly, some even fell off the sticks! But they were still yummy.

Marks out of ten? 7. My fault. they could have reached an 8-9 if they’d been firmer.

Would I make them again? Yes. But I’d follow the recipe properly.

Would I do anything differently? Yes, I’d be especially careful to get a much firmer cake/frosting ratio.