The cake pop experiment

COOKING tip of the day

Since the latest craze is cake pops, my girls gave me a Bake Pop pan for Christmas. They wanted to get involved in the trend. Well, they wanted me to get involved so they could eat them. After a couple of hours of hard work I ended up with 18 brownie pops that still had to be glazed and decorated. Next time I won’t make the brownie version since it required filling the pan with batter by using a squeeze tube and hoping that I had filled it half-way without being able to see through the pan. My squeeze tube consisted of a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off. And I over-filled them so brownie spilled out the hole in the top as they baked. If you make them using cake batter you only have to fill the bottom half of the pan. The brownies were difficult to remove even though I had gone to the trouble of greasing and flouring both sides of the Bake Pop pan. Since it was late by the time I got to that point, I put the pops in the freezer and pulled them out today to decorate. This step is just as much work as baking them. You have to melt chocolate and then work fast to dip them and sprinkle them. It was recommended that you have a piece of Styrofoam to stand them up in. But I didn’t, of course. So I improvised with a shoe box with holes punched in the top, as you can see in the picture. It didn’t work out as well, but still got the job done, which is all I was hoping for at that point. I hope they taste like they took four hours to make! I'll find out as soon as I wash one down with a Diet Coke.

Other versions of cake pops just use a baked cake crumbled and mixed with frosting and then rolled into balls; much easier. But we made Oreo balls at Christmas and those don’t even require baking and they taste the best.