A busy baking weekend part 2 - Halloween cake pops

The benefits of making a chocolate cake for someone else is the possibility of leftover cake bits from shaving and smooth to make the cake flat.   What is the best thing to do with these extra pieces?  Well thanks to Bakearella - Cake Pops.   I am jealous of her creativity,  her book is awesome and I now have a new goal to try and come up with my own characters and items.   I made the Santa hats and trees last year at my Christmas party and they were a hit so I figured I would try again and make some Halloween style treats for work.  So I am attempting pumpkins and ghosts. 


What you need:

• Cake - Your own homemade, boxed, store bought. 
• Icing - Store bought or homemade
• Orange and White Chocolate
• Something for a Green stem - Now Bakarella uses Tic Tacs, I however used green sprinkles because I forgot to pick up Tic Tacs at the store.   I recommend using the Tic Tacs.  HAHA  They look much better. 
• Edible markers - and I stress GOOD ONES!

Step 1 - Crumble the cake (assuming it is already baked) and mix with icing - Hands are easiest.   A 13x9 cake would use 1 typical container of icing. 


Step 2 - Take pieces of mixture and roll into balls or whatever shape required.  In this case I did balls or pumpkins and then cylindrical shapes wider at the bottom for the ghosts.   Put these in the fridge or freezer to get cold and stiff

Step 3 - Melt the chocolate using a double boiler, place the cake pops on a candy stick and dip and roll in the chocolate.   Tap of the excess and roll around to remove dripping.    Put the pop in Styrofoam to dry.

Note:  If you are making the pumpkin ones, you need to add the green stem right away before the chocolate dries. 


Step 4 - Once they are all dried you can add your faces.   This is where a really good marker comes into play,  I was using a Wilton marker and found it just didn't cut it for drawing on chocolate.  It was hard to get it to work at all and when it did it was very streaky - as you can see from the photos. 



Despite the streaky faces, they were eaten up at work pretty quickly and everyone thought they were quite cute.   I will definitely attempt cake pops again and will repeat my Christmas pops in a few months.    I suggest you try your own cake pops and I would love to know how they work out and if you created anything new. 


Meg's rating - D-EEE-LICIOUS!    It's hard to go wrong with cake, icing and chocolate especially when I made my the cake myself, but warranted less E's because it was store bought icing.  :-P 

BONUS # 2


Another benefit of making a chocolate cake for someone is you may have extra batter that you turn into chocolate cupcakes.     So what do when you have chocolate cupcakes, and no icing but melted chocolate???     Dip the cupcakes in the chocolate of course!   I dipped a few in orange chocolate and few in white chocolate, put on a some quick fondant decorations et VOILA!!!

Pumpkin Cupcakes

My artistic shot

Mummy Cupcakes