Ok so where was I? Hmmm, oh yes! The cake pop's for J4's birthday.
J4 LOVES big trucks. Diesels, 18-wheelers, delivery trucks, fuel trucks, cement mixers, the list goes on. So I thought that would be a great theme for his 2nd birthday.
And instead of a cake, I'll do cake pops! Now that I've perfected my technique, I figured it would be a piece of....um, yea.
I had some German chocolate cake already baked and in the freezer. I had planned to try making German chocolate cake pops for Valentine's Day with Xuan Huynh. Well, plans fell through and we never got to make them. So I thought I'd use the leftover cake for these cake pops. Bad idea.
I don't exactly know what went wrong. The cake was already VERY moist when it thawed. I don't know if it was wet from being frozen or if it was just that moist as a cake. Or if the German chocolate aspect had anything to do with it. But when I mixed the frosting with it, it came out looking more like thick batter than shape-able dough.
So I added some flour. Then some cocoa. Then some powdered sugar. Then more flour. I lost track of how many thickening agents I added to absorb some of the moisture! Nothing worked. Finally, with the clock ticking down and still no presentable "cake", I had to drop back and punt.
I baked an entire new cake. A yellow one this time. (it was all I had) I also discovered a secret that I'll use in the future. I didn't want to bake an entire cake because we were going out of town the next day. So I made 24 cupcakes instead. I would decorate 12 for our small party and then we'd just eat the rest plain.
Here's a picture:
So that's what I did. I then pulled out my old Wilton decorating tips and colored some icing black. (or tried to. Dark colors are hard.) I used yellow candy melts, which were already round, as the middle of the tires. I used the best "rope" technique I could remember and made the tires. I was actually kind of proud of myself! For the other cupcakes, I used chocolate frosting with the basket weave tip to make tracks in dirt. Or kinda like that anyway.
THEN, since I had 12 cupcakes left, I got brave. Going back to my original plan, I made cake pops! Now, yellow cake with chocolate frosting looked a little strange inside. Not bad, but not swirly or anything like that. (The white ones I made at Christmas were much prettier.) I used the small circle cutter I had bought to make them tire-shaped. They were huge! They almost wouldn't stay on the sticks. For reference, I smashed up 6 cupcakes to mix with the frosting and I got 6 cake pops out of it! I probably would have gotten 10-12 normal sized cake pops out of those 6 cupcakes.
I then dipped them in chocolate and used the yellow candy melts, still unmelted, as the middle of the tires.
Picture!
Honestly, I liked my cupcakes better. So all in all, I was happy that I had had to go to Plan B. Back to my future reference (haha!), I've decided that instead of making a cake and freezing it for cake pops, I'll make cupcakes. That way, I can only thaw 4-6 and not have to make 30-70 cake pops each time. I can just make 10 - 20. Also in the future, if I try tire cake pops again, I'm going to skip the cake altogether and use marshmallows! I'll cut them in half and insert the stick. That should make smaller tires that stay on the stick easier. So I was glad to have a Plan C as well!
I learned a lot that day. :)
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