Cake pops

I had not planned to make cake pops. I thought about it, but decided it was too fussy. So I made a big chocolate half sheet cake. Then something funny happened while I was baking it; it was taking absolutely forever. After an hour and a half it was still not done. It's a bigger pan than I'm used to, which is perhaps why it took me a while to recognize that at some point instead of turning off the timer, I had turned off the oven. Whoops. I eventually got the cake baked, but of course it was a wreck. Tasty, but a total mess coming out of the pan. 

I couldn't bear to toss out a whole cake, mess though it was. Then I remembered that the first step in making cake pops is to crumble a whole cake into bits. It was meant to be.

The next step is to mix in a big blob of frosting, so that it turns into a thick chocolatey paste, the consistency of cookie dough.

Then you can roll it into small, dense balls of chocolate cake paste. Yum.

I froze the balls for several days. This is what made this whole process doable for me; it can be done in stages, with days or even weeks in between streaks of action. It's a good thing, because the next step turned out to be a doozy. You're supposed to just melt a bunch of white chocolate, dip a lollipop stick into it, poke the stick into a cake ball, and dip the ball in the chocolate to coat it. But the balls sometimes fell off the sticks or broke in two, and the chocolate was too thick, and how did the internet make it look so easy? Even with the diligent assistance of a visiting former pastry chef (thank you, Renee Michelle!) it was a big job. We used three pounds of white chocolate.

Maybe I had too many. But what else was I going to do with all that messed-up cake? Here they are in the freezer... beef above, chicken below.

When we ran out of floral bricks to stand them up in, we made cake-pop truffles instead, and decorated them with sprinkles.

I had my heart set on ninja cake pops because Aaron and his friends are obsessed with ninjas. The night before the party I melted yet more white chocolate (the fourth pound!) and dyed it a sort of a dark sage blue, as though the ninjas were stealing their masks from Eddie Bauer. The first few were a total failure; the blue chocolate didn't stick! It was because of the condensation that formed on the pops when I took them out of the freezer. I had to dry off each pop with a paper towel before dipping it. Then I was able to spoon blue chocolate over the four sides to form something like a ninja mask. (Or ... a small round television set?)

After a couple dozen ninja masks I tried rolling some pops in yellow sugar crystals. Nice, but too subtle.

On a whim I dipped just the very top of a pop into blue chocolate, then dipped the wet blob into brightly colored sprinkles. Love! It looks like funny clown hair!

The last bit was to draw faces with a food pen. Pretty great.

On the morning of the party, I took the pops out of the freezer to thaw. When I checked on them a while later... disaster! Condensation again. It had dripped down all their little faces, erasing their features and smearing their headgear. It looked like they had cried their faces off.

I patted off each sad little face with a paper towel again, and redrew it. It was a piece of stress I didn't relish on the morning of a big party. But it all worked out! Here is the final presentation: ninjas above, clowns below, and truffles to hold the candles.

Big thank you to Jess for the floral bricks and the checkered cloth. The presentation was a big hit! As was the eating.