Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Cake Pops

This week's theme seems to be What in the world can I do with this??
In some cases, this question leads to a great result, in some cases, you look at your finished product and all you can think is "What the...?!"
That's exactly what happened to me when I tried to make this Swedish Visiting Cake. I had picked it specifically because I had leftover almonds, a lemon whose juice I had used for cooking that day, and a few eggs. I don't eat eggs by themselves and hardly ever use them in my cooking, so I needed to make a cake to use them up.
I have no idea what went wrong, since I followed the recipe to a T and nobody else seemed to have problems with it, but the cake turned out horrible. It was raw on the inside, yet almost burned on the outside, and waaaaaaay to sweet for my taste. Inedible. I didn't even take a picture, I was that disappointed.
I had used real vanilla, though, and all these other good ingredients, and I wasn't just going to toss them. So I asked myself the above-mentioned question again and stumbled across this.
Bakerella's cupcake pops were possibly the cutest cake related thing I had ever seen. I mean, teeny tiny cupcakes! What's there not to love.
Of course, after thoroughly having gone through her archives, I can safely say that she has made cakey things that are even cuter.
Anyway, I decided to turn my messed-up cake into cupcake pops.

Here's the original recipe again and here's what I did:
  • I cut my pathetic little cake into chunks and put them back into the oven to finish baking (didn't want anyone to catch salmonella). They ended up pretty dry, but that resulted in the cake being able to absorb more sugar-neutralizing fluids, which was most definitely a good thing.
  • I let the mutilated cake cool completely and afterwards put it into my food processor. It had almonds on top and I wanted to use those, too.
  • Bakerella says to add cream cheese frosting, but since the cake was so horribly sweet to begin with, I just added plain cream cheese (whipped). My boyfriend asked me to make it more "fruity", so I added some lemon juice. This resulted in the mixture being a little wet, so to balance that I used some ground hazelnuts and almonds I had lying around. I really have no idea how much I used, I just kept adding the stuff until I liked both the taste and the texture. I guess it would have been about 6 tablespoons.
  • I also added some sea salt (about 1/4 teaspoon).

I ended up with something that tasted like cheesecake cookie dough. Quite good, actually. I went on to shape my cupcake pops according to Bakerella's instructions and put them in the refrigerator overnight. Today, I put the finishing touches on them. My boyfriend even helped me decorate them (which was a first - he hates cooking and especially baking). He did insist his cupcakes be blue, though, not pink, so I dyed the white chocolate a shade he'd be more comfortable with.



He's quite the little boy sometimes. :-)

We used chocolate flavored candy coating for the cupcake bases and real white chocolate for the tops. Next time, I may use candy coating instead of white chocolate. While real chocolate tastes better in my opinion, it takes forever to set.
We had mini Smarties (like M&Ms), colored sugars, chocolate and sugar vermicelli, nut brittles and different kinds of sprinkles to decorate the cupcakes with.



In addition to the cupcake pops I also made some cake ball pops. I added some amaretto to the dough, completely covered them in chocolate flavored candy coating and rolled them in
sliced and crushed almonds. They're the "grown-up" version of these adorable little morsels.


I think they turned out very cute. What do you think?

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