A couple of my friends and I decided to throw our friend, Tanaya, a baby shower. I was assigned to make some cake pops (cake balls on a stick). I thought it would be a ton of fun and should be easy (Erica made hundreds when Michael and Taylor got married) and not too time consuming. Boy was I wrong!
First you have to bake the cake, or in my case, cakes. Then you have to make frosting, or in my case, frostings. Then you put the cake and frosting in the kitchen aide and blend it all together, this created a cookie dough like texture. Then you roll into balls (I made big balls for the actual pops and smaller ones for the cake balls) and put them in the freezer.
As they are chilling/freezing you start melting chocolate. I tried this step four times before I was able to get it to work. I learned about seizing chocolate; this means that the chocolate gets to hot and it ruins the composition (gets grainy, hard, dry and won't melt). Things I learned about seizing chocolate; chocolate will seize if it gets to hot or if it gets any water in it. I was trying to make a home made double boiler and failed because I was filling the lower pan too high (so it was spilling over the sides and getting some steam/moisture in the chocolate) and had it at too high a temperature (the water should not be boiling). I seized two batched of chocolate and then, heating it much slower (in a double boiler with a little water at about 3-4 on the oven setting) and it worked great. I tested some cake balls and they dipped beautifully but the chocolate never hardened. I then learned that this is because I used chocolate chips and making dipping chocolate out of real chocolate is hard. So the fourth time I did it (with the help of my mom) I used chocolate bark (fake waxy chocolate) and we micro waved it in increments of 15 sec.
After you get the chocolate melted you begin dipping the balls. This is harder than I suspected because you have to dip it and get off extra chocolate but don't take off too much chocolate or you can see the dip marks (I dipped with a spoon and a fork and trying not to get fork lines was difficult). This was also a little dirty (not too big of a problem because what woman does not like to be covered in chocolate, however the chocolate ended up getting everywhere- quite a mess). Making the cake pops was difficult because they would slide off the sticks, once they hit the hot chocolate, and it was hard to keep the sticks clean.
Then you let the chocolate harden and do any beautification; sprinkles (which you actually had to do when it was wet) or frosting/white chocolate swirls/stripes. So it was a lot more work than I thought and I have definitely learned some do's and dont's if I ever try it again.
In the end I made four flavors of cake balls; chocolate/chocolate, chocolate/mint, chocolate/maraschino cherry and white chocolate/raspberry. I ended up having a lot extra but, good news, they freeze perfectly. So I now have cake balls in my freezer, not super great for the waist line, but easy and convenient if I ever need to take a treat to something.
1 comment:
I wish I could have helped. I learned all those things as well. they looked beautiful!
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