About a month ago I stumbled upon bakerella.com website a learned about adorable little cake balls. I hand never heard of them before, but they were so cute. Essentially they are mashed up cake rolled into little balls and then dipped into chocolate and placed on a lollipop stick. After coming across the website and doing some further research, I thought perhaps I’d have a go at making these pops myself. I had taken a cake decorating course at the local Micheal’s store about 3 years ago, and found that I really liked cake decorating and that it wasn’t as hard as it had seemed. In fact that same year I even ended up making a wedding cake for a friend of a co-worker. I felt that if I could master cake decorating making cake pops couldn’t be all that hard.
I hadn’t really had a chance to bake and decorate for almost a year, so I was excited at tackling this project. My first attempt at the cake pops was about a week ago, when I made a white cake. I rolled the cake into little balls and the like and set them in the fridge to cool over night. Unfortunately I wasn’t thinking and forgot to cover the cake balls. The next morning the cake balls had dried out. I thought I would try to salvage what I could. At the time I had some chocolate chips in the fridge so I figured they would work just as good as dipping chocolate. It turns out however, that chocolate chips are meant to stay morsels until you bit into them, so they don’t melt well. In fact the chocolate was too thick for the cake pops and since the balls were already dried, they just crumbled into a big mess. Trying to find a solution I discovered that you can thin out your melted chocolate chips by adding shorting to the chocolate. This seemed to work, but still I only had 4 cake pops that survived the experiment. I had a spear cake, but was worried about making another failed attempted because of the chocolate I ended up just covering the cake with the chocolate, then decorating with frosting. I still had a lot of chocolate left so I made melted chocolate cookies, as opposed to chocolate chip cookies. Since me and my hubby don’t really eat sweets, I took the cake and cookies to work. 
Though I considered it all a failure, it still looked pretty.
Today, however I decided to try the cake pops again. This time I was planing on decorating them 4th of July style, and take them to work tomorrow. I made sure that this time I had the right type of chocolate and even bought a proper cake pop stand. Something not shown in the picture of ingredients is a blue and red tube of Wilton glitter gel for decoration. I made the cake as directed. I choose this time a devil foods cake and white chocolate. Like last time I went with Pillsbury’s new sugar free cake mix and frosting. Although the chocolate would have sugar, I was trying to limit the sugar in the recipe as much as possible. After baking the cake I let it cool about 3 hours in the fridge before crumbling it. 
I was surprised how moist the cake was even before I added the frosting to hold the cake balls together. This time I made sure I covered the cake balls properly. In total I made about 48 cake balls.
After the cake balls chilled a while I melted the Wilton White Chocolate melts in my mini slow cooker. I took one tray of cake pops at a time and placed them in the freezer for 15-minutes. Then I would dip the end of the cake pop stick into the chocolate and then into the cake ball. This kind of locks the cake and stick together. I then put them back in the freezer for another 15-minutes before dipping the whole cake pop into the chocolate.
After dipping the cake pops in chocolate I put them back in the fridge for about 30 minutes. I did have some issues with the dipping process. One was although I bought a special stand for the cake pops I feel the holes were still too close together, because some of my cake pops still stuck together. Also, it seemed that crumbs from the cake was getting into my white chocolate, thus although the cake pops are white, you can kind of tell it’s a chocolate cake under there. I think If I do this again, I do a small batch of chocolate to give the cake pops a quick first coat, then do a clean batch of chocolate without crumbs for a nice shiny finish.
After letting the cake pops cool, I decorated with the glitter gel. All in all I have to say I am really happy with how these came out. I plan on taking them to work tomorrow, and hope everyone likes them. Since I usually don’t eat a lot of sweets whenever I get into these baking modes, I tend to bring them to work, so I hope my colleagues are appreciative. Anyways, here’s my 4th of July Cake Pops:
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