Monday, March 1, 2010

‘You Can’t Hurry Love’…And You Can't Hurry Cupcake Pops

It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this…partly due to life being a bit busy, but probably the real underlying reason is I didn’t want to dissect all the things that went so wrong with my cupcake pops. As I mentioned in the Sweet Treat Party post, they didn’t really turn out like I’d hoped and definitely not anywhere even remotely as good as Bakerella’s.

So what happened?

I was rushing, I knew it while I was making them, but I didn’t think it would matter…WRONG. I think it did matter, a lot. Cupcake pops require much more time and attention than I had to give that day.

My biggest piece of advice, if you try to make cupcake pops, allow A LOT of time and TLC.

Primarily, do not try to save time by cutting back the refrigerator and/or freezer time. I think Bakerella recommends at least a few hours in the refrigerator (or approximately 15 minutes in the freezer) after making the cake balls AND after forming the cake balls into any desired shapes before covering in chocolate or candy coating.

Cake Balls

I did not have room in my freezer, so I stuck them in the refrigerator. But I did not have multiple hours. I think I had the cake balls in the refrigerator about an hour maybe a little more.

That part probably wasn’t as important as the refrigerator/freezer time after shaping the balls into cupcake pops and hearts, which was definitely less than an hour. I think the shorter time did not allow them to set as much as they should have and hence made dipping/covering them with the chocolate and candy coating more difficult.

On cake pops that require more than one color of chocolate/candy coating, I tried to let the first color set before applying the second (for example, I tried to do the bottom of the cupcakes before the top). Covering the bottom of the cupcakes wasn’t that bad. I dipped the bottom into the chocolate stuck in the stick and then placed the cupcake pop upside down on wax paper to set.

The tops were a completely different story :(

I didn’t have time to hold them and let the candy coating set so I just placed each stick in a Styrofoam block…but then the color on the top dripped down over the bottom.

Sad

I also had planned to put the heart-shaped cake bites on sticks, but the sticks didn’t really work with the heart size and/or shape I used, so I really ended up with heart-shaped cake bites rather than cake pops like I originally wanted.

I quickly realized I wouldn’t be able to spend enough time and attention on each one, so I just focused on trying to get them all covered in some manner.

Very Sad

The majority were not very cute or pretty.

The good news though, is that they were a hit because they tasted yummy. So it wasn’t a complete loss.

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