Cake Pops/Balls

Story behind, I can’t help help myself, as a woman I cannot simply state the facts. I must tell not just A and skip directly to Z, I must tell all the letters inbetween. lol, just so you guys know, also doesn’t help that I’m thorough (or as my husband might say, long-winded).

So, I’d heard about cake balls almost as soon as I started caking. Well, really, once I started checking the forums like cakecentral.com (DO NOT hang out there for an extended period, you WILL become addicted). They sounded good but at that time I was too excited about just decorating cakes. Then last year I found Bakerella’s site and was very intrigued, she made the cutest of everything! I decided to try something simple, just the cake balls without any decorations…and while they were delicious I was kind of upset that nearly all of them split. Plus I really didn’t like that I could see the cake peeking through the bottom as shown in this video.

I read more, experimented more and am still not ready to post a full tutorial on how to make the pops themselves but here’s yet another video, this time it’s from someone else and their ideas worked pretty well for me. I still had a few fall off the stick but no cracking because I was now putting the pops in the fridge instead of the freezer.

On to the decorating, the last I made these I really felt like it was time to experiment with decorating them. I melted some candy melts, put them into a plastic decorating bag and snipped off the end. I tried to just do some simple lines but they were sharp, flat lines instead (pop on the right):

I thought that the way the candy melts came out of the end reminded me of a petal tip. Hmmm…..well, why not? I did more experimenting and thought that the next time I would go all out (not having time or energy to do more that night).

New Year’s Eve provided the excuse I needed. I melted red, yellow, green and blue candy melts in little bowls. To the red I add a couple orange candy melts and to the blue I added a couple of purple candy melts, just to get some color variation. I didn’t do this until both original colors were completely melted, and when I added the extra colors I didn’t stir so they wouldn’t get lost. 

I cut just a bit off each end but for the leaf bag I needed to cut it differently, to make it like my 352 tip . The seam edges of the bag were the ‘valley’ side, the middle of the bag was the ‘mountain’ side.

Now for the sad news. Yes I filmed it but things didn’t work out. Worse still is that it will be a while before I make another cake (or cake pop) decorating video due to tendinitis (which seems to be taking over nearly all my joints-adding feet and legs to my elbows, knees and hands). I only decorated 15 of the 55 pops I made and my hand was numb

I really loved how these turned out! Before giving them a try I’d suggest practicing on something else first, get the hang of the flow of melted candy melts. Try different angles to see how to get the shape you want. You’d be surprised at how many pretty decorations you can make! All the pops in the pictures below are decorated with the candy melts and the plastic Wilton decorating bags.