Friday 6 June 2014

Lemon & Orange Cake Pops - I am feeling just a little bit accomplished

I'm no baker, I leave that to my sis, Tash, mostly, but I have achieved my first ever batch of cake pops! :D They aren't perfect, I think I'm going to have to practice rolling them in icing and sprinkles to get a more even coverage, but they taste good, even if I do say so myself :).

For anyone who is interested - this is how I made them:

Equipment:
cake pop tin/mould
mixing bowl
electric hand mixer (or elbow grease, it's up to you)
cake pop sticks
cooling rack
scales

Ingredients:
cake mix:
113g/4oz self-raising flour
113g/4oz margarine/butter
113g/4oz caster sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp lemon flavouring

icing:
icing sugar (as much as needed, see recipe)
lemon flavouring (or whatever you prefer)
orange flavouring (as above)
colouring (I used natural orange, since that was my flavouring)

sprinkles - pick what you like, as long as they are small

Making the cake pops:
This is an all in one bowl recipe. In a bowl, use the mixer to cream the butter and caster sugar together until smooth and the mixture goes paler. Add the eggs and lemon flavouring and whisk together until smooth. Fold in the flour.

Grease the cake pop moulds and fill the bottom mould until it is heaped with mixture and then place the top mould on, sealing down. Place in an oven pre-heated to 180C for twenty minutes, or until a cocktail stick comes out of a pop cleanly. Leave to cool and then carefully extract from the moulds. I found I had some cake bleeding out the sides of the cake pop shapes, but this was easily trimmed and added to this cook's waistline as I went :)

Making the icing:
When the pops are cool and firmed up, make your icing. Lots of people use chocolate, but I decided to use a simple water-based flavoured icing and lots of sprinkles. I took icing sugar, about 5 - 8 tablespoons (this was chuck it in a bowl time, I wasn't measuring and I ended up making two lots of icing to cover all the pops). I added a couple of capfuls of each flavouring and colouring as needed to get the shade I wanted and then enough water to make a sloppy paste, the consistency of dipping batter.

Decorating the pops:
I took each pop, rolled it around in the bowl of icing until it was fully covered, then rolled it in a bowl of my chosen sprinkles until ample coverage was achieved - pretty much the same technique I used with egg and breadcrumbs when I'm coating fish. I then left them on the cooling rack to being to harden.

P.S. Only once the pops were partially hardened did I put them on their sticks since when I tried this before decorating, much hilarity and cake pop skewers were the result! ;P I then let them harden completely and put them in a cup cake box for delivery to the party I'm attending.

P.P.S Make more cake pops than you need, because there will be casualties :)

P.P.P.S I did try with thicker icing that I pasted on, but the result was something that looked like it was the incredible melting pop ;P

8 comments:

  1. There's always casualties when I cook. :)

    Good for you! I think they look yummy.

    Madeline @ The Shellshank Redemption

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    1. It shouldn't count as cooking unless there are casualties :)

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  2. Looks yummy.

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  3. Looks delicious! I'd always wondered how cake pops were made, lol. And I love those dinosaur sprinkles.

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    Replies
    1. Those sprinkles are so cute, almost too cute to eat ;P

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  4. Cake on a stick? Madness! ;) Succeeding in baking endeavors is always fun. Great job!

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    1. LOL! It is a truly weird concept, and I would say they're fun for kids, but all of us who ate them were adults and we enjoyed them too ;P

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