How To Get Cake Pops Not To Crack

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A lot of people may not realize it, but cake pops are actually a bit more difficult to make than simply rolling balls of cake batter into perfect little circles. It isn’t exactly easy to make sure that the cake stays in its little shell, and that it stays in shape while it cooks.

When you are cooking cake pops for the first time, there’s a good chance that you will run into some common problems.

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One of the most common problems that people encounter with their cake pops is that they seem to crack. Once the cake batter is formed into little balls and then cooked, you might not think that anything can go wrong when you apply the frosting. Unfortunately, this is where a fair few problems can begin.

If you notice that your cake pops routinely crack when you apply the frosting to them and let them cool, you may begin to wonder what is going on. Thankfully, they can be relatively easy to fix once you know what goes wrong and how you can change things to make the conditions right.

With that being said, even if you did everything right the first time, you should always know how to remedy a cracked cake pop so that your treats can look just as good as they will taste when you are ready to eat them.

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There are a few different ways you can go about fixing the issue, but first you should learn about why it happens.

While there isn’t much you can do to avoid these unfortunate happenings, you can reduce how often they occur by ensuring that you are cooking your cake pops properly each time. There is actually one reason why your cake pop may be cracking when you take a look at them.

The most common reason why cake pops crack is because the temperature of the cake ball and the frosting you applied to it was too great. More often than not, the coating will have been too hot and the cake ball will have been too cold, although vice versa can happen. How does this work?

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When any object is hot, it expands. Likewise, when any object is cold, it will shrink. These changes, for most materials, are on a microscopic level, but sometimes that is more than enough to cause cracks in your beautiful cake pops.

As the heat from the warm coating transfers to the cold cake ball, the cake ball will expand ever so slightly. As the coating begins to cool down a little bit more, it will harden and truly attach to the outside of the cake batter.

Slowly, the cake batter will also cool down too, as this is often the stage where the cake pops go into the fridge so the frosting can harden completely.

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Unfortunately, as the frosting cools down and hardens, it will also be transferring slight bits of heat to the cake batter. This will cause the cake batter to expand ever so slightly, which will put cracks into the hardening frosting coating.

In short, the primary cause of cracked cake pops is when there is too big of a disparity between the temperatures of the cake batter and the coating. Luckily, this is incredibly easy to fix, as all you have to do is make sure that both parts are a similar temperature before you apply them next time.

Sadly, there isn’t that much you can do when the cake pops have already cracked. No matter what you do to fix them, it will have to be a noticeable fix.

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Many people are okay with simply leaving the imperfect cake pops as an at-home treat rather than putting them up for display or offering them as gifts.

Depending on the size and scale of the crack, you could try moving the cracked piece back into its original position and hope that the cracks disappear when things are back in place. For larger cracks that run across the bulk of the frosting, this isn’t always feasible.

You can consider using very small amounts of frosting to try and cover up the crack, as if you were painting over it. This will depend entirely on the consistency of your cake frosting and how well you can apply this cover-up. For some people, this ends up being a good solution to a problem.

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If you are at your wit’s end, you can consider just dumping the entire cake ball back into the frosting and applying a second coat of frosting. While this certainly has the chance of fully covering up the crack, it will also undo any decorative work you did beforehand and it will also make the coating much thicker than it should be.

These are the three ways you can attempt to fix an already cracked cake pop. The best way to fix the problem is to make sure that it doesn’t have the chance to happen in the first place by keeping everything at a much closer temperature.

The best way to make sure that this doesn’t happen is to rely on a thermometer to keep everything at a closer temperature so that the chances of cracks happening is very slim.

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A crucial part of making cake pops is putting them in the fridge, but you can consider putting them into an airtight container so that the cold air doesn’t affect the cake pops as much as it otherwise would.

You can also consider not heating the frosting up as much to get it to the proper consistency. More often than not, this type of frosting is easy to melt and even holding it in your hand long enough will begin to melt it.

You can experiment with heating settings to see what the lowest setting you can get away with is, as all kitchen utensils are going to be slightly different.

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The goal of this is to reach the proper frosting consistency for your cake pops without overheating the frosting. You can use a thermometer and a “trial and error” attitude to figure out which temperature of frosting gets you the optimal results for your cake pops.

Before you know it, you will know the tricks to getting cake pops that not only taste good, but look good as well.

Sarah is the founder of Baking Kneads, LLC, a blog sharing guides, tips, and recipes for those learning how to bake. Growing up as the daughter of a baker, she spent much of her childhood learning the basics in a local bakery.Seriously. We’ve all burned the heck out of our chocolate, lost a cake ball off the stick, had our beautiful cake pops crack 5 minutes later,  or had them leak weird stuff everywhere! It’s sooo frustrating!

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I look back on my first cake pops (if I’m even allowed to call them that) and they are sad. See the picture at the end of this as proof. Let’s just say, practice makes perfect and now I’m obsessed with cake pops. I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. Dang Bakerella, look what she started. Just kidding, I love her.

This can happen for a couple different reasons. I think the most common is thick coating and it is dragging your cake pop down. Smooth coating is one of the most (if not

Additionally, huge cake balls = heavy cake balls. So try to make them moderate size (1″) and use a spoon (small cookie dough scoop, coffee scoop, melon baller) or something to measure an even amount for each ball. I bought an awesome coffee scoop at Target for $5 and it gives me perfectly sized and consistent cake balls every time.

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When I first started making cake balls I would use the whole container (16 oz) of frosting. Now, I start with adding 1/3 of the can and typically use up to 1/2 cup (8 oz) of frosting. You could probably get away with even less than that, but I found this amount is good for me and rolls out smooth. Cake balls that are too gooey won’t stay put!

Also, when dipping your cake pops, dip the stick in the coating first and insert into the cake ball. Then,  when dipping the cake pop make sure that you don’t bump the bottom of the cake ball on the bowl/cup. Finally, don’t swirl the cake pop around in the coating, just dip and get out!

This is probably the easiest problem to fix and it begins with baking your cake. Do not overbake. Simple enough! Second, trim off the edges and (if you’re obsessed like I am) leave out the bottom of the cake,  too. Mix

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With frosting. Thoroughly, as in: dig in using your clean hands to mush the cake and frosting together. Finally, roll, roll, roll. The smoother they look as uncoated cake balls, the better they will look when dipped. Voila.

They look perfectly fine, then magically they look like they experienced an earthquake. Super frustrating! Typically, this is caused by the difference in temperature of the