Christmas pudding cake pops

My first attempt at making cake pops - and it isn't as easy as it looks!

Cake pops are the latest trend - little balls of cake on a stick, that can be dipped in sprinkles, coated in chocolate or decorated to look like little animals, easter eggs, or anything really.

They are pretty quick and effortless to make, but as I discovered, not foolproof! To start with you need cake - any cake will do. Once it is baked and cooled, you break up the cake into cake crumbs. I used some Oreo cupcakes I hadn't frosted yet.

Mix the cake crumbs with either cream cheese or frosting - I used some of Betty Crocker's ready made chocolate fudge frosting. I don't know the exact ratio - just use enough so the mixture can be shaped into balls, but isn't too sticky, as you can see below.

I put them in the freezer for about ten minutes to firm up. Then insert cake pop sticks - I bought these from Hobbycraft but you can also use lollipop sticks. Apparently the cake balls stay on the sticks better if you dip them in a little melted chocolate or icing first, but I didn't do this.

I wanted to coat mine in chocolate so I used a small amount of Wilton chocolate candy melts.

Melt in the microwave

Then dip each cake pop in the melted chocolate. This is where I had difficuties - my chocolate wasn't runny enough and was actually quite thick, so I couldn't dip the cake and get a smooth coating. I ended up half dipping, then using a spoon to spoon some of the chocolate over, then deciding it was easier to use a sillicon pastry brush to brush on the melted chocolate! It worked OK in the end but doesn't give a particularly smooth finish.

I stood the cake pops in a piece of polystyrene so they could harden.

They even fit nicely in my fridge!

I wanted to make the cake pops look like Christmas puddings (which is why it didn't matter too much that they didn't have a smooth finish). I moulded a small piece of roll-out icing and used a little buttercream to stick it to the cake pop, then stuck a ready-made holly shape made out of icing on top. I bought these over the internet to go on some other Christmassy cakes I was making, and had some leftover.

So despite the problems I had with the candy melts, I don't think my first attempt at cake pops looks too bad!