Jesicakes: Cake Pops

I wouldn't necessarily call cake pops the new cupcake, but their trend definitely is going around. Personally, I find them a little too time consuming to be worth the effort. I am a cookie person though and if I'm going to spend my time on decorating I'd rather decorate cookies! However, I had some leftover cake from an event and I didn't know what to do with it...and then the idea struck me to finally try to make cake pops! I didn't want to do any crazy decorating, just something bright and cute and perfect for spring but that had great flavor. The leftover cake I had was my Honey, Lavender, & Lemon Cake and a plain yellow cake, and I thought it would be nice to do a Lemon Cream Cheese Icing since I also had leftover lemon curd. For me cake pops are the perfect way to re-purpose left over ingredients in a new, bright, fun form! The result was sweet and floral cake with a bit of tang from the cream cheese and lemon. Between the flavor and the bright colors they were the perfect spring treat!

Below I have the recipe I used for the Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting and a link to the cake recipe I used...but this post is really a template to do any flavor you'd like! All you need is cake and icing essentially and just follow the instructions below! Like I said before, the perfect thing to do if you have any leftovers! Especially if you were carving or leveling or forming cakes...don't waste all those little pieces! Turn them into cake pops!

Cake Pops

Recipe for Lemon Cream Cheese Icing adapted from The Hobby Rome Diaries
Makes about 3 dozen cake pops
Print Recipe

Ingredients for Lemon Cream Cheese Icing

- 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
- 8 oz cream cheese

- 1/3 cup of lemon curd

- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

- 1/2 sheet cake. I used my Honey, Lavender, & Lemon cake.

Prepare the Lemon Cream Cheese Icing. You will only need 1/4 cup of icing, unfortunately it's very difficult to make less than this recipe if you have a stand mixer (hand mixer may be easier). I've always mentioned freezing extra buttercream and cake from old recipes or events. So if you do have any icing in your freezer left over this is a great way to put it to use!

Once your cake is completely cooled (if you made new) or thawed (if it was leftover), chop up it up in a food processor. You want it to be pretty fine, with no large pieces of cake left.

Place the cake crumbs in your stand mixer. The texture should be coarse and sand-like, making sure there are no large pieces.

Add the icing. Now, I said approximately 1/4 cup per 1/2 sheet cake. This depends on how dry/moist or dense/fluffy your cake is. Just add a little at a time until you can form cake balls that hold together, yet aren't too mushy. Too much icing and they will fall off the stick and not hold their shape, too little and they won't hold together.

Take the cake and form it into ball, approximately one inch in diameter.

Place sticks in the centers. At this point I put them in the freezer briefly to really secure the sticks before dipping them in the chocolate.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler or in the microwave. I used colored candy melts. Coat the cake pop and gently shake and rolls off the extra chocolate. That's why I froze them briefly. If the stick isn't set in the cake, it may break out when you dip the pops in chocolate. Once the pops are sealed with the chocolate you won't have to worry about them falling apart.

Decorate your cake pops with a different color chocolate or with sprinkles or sugar or whatever you'd like.

I did them so the cake was on the bottom with the sticks coming out upwards. If you want to decorated them so the they're cake up, get a piece of foam and stick the pops in the foam and decorate them that way.