How To Make Cake Pops Out Of Failed Cake

How did a fail batch of cupcakes turn into an artisan treat? Well, I took a tip from a blog post by my professional baker friend, Rosy Choi, on how to turn baking disasters into new delicious treats 🙂

My original plan was to make green tea matcha cupcakes. I wanted to make a chiffon cake instead of normal cupcake because I wanted to capture the Asian essence of the green tea component. I played around with using only egg whites…well it didn’t turn out so well.

The cupcakes came out in such an odd form. The cupcake itself was “straight.” Usually, cupcakes have a muffin top. The muffin top didn’t just not appear, it shrunk. Yes, a huge crater formed on the top AND the bottom of the cupcake. The middle of the cakes were 1cm less thick than the walls. In short…this batch was absolutely not presentable.

Sinful Sundays: Easter Cake Pops Fail

So what did I do with this fail batch of cupcakes? Usually, I would’ve just given them all to my dad to eat because he eats anything. BUT, after reading Rosy’s post, I decided to take her awesome advice to make cake pops out of them!

What a genius idea! It’s so simple that I wonder how I never thought about that myself. Cake crumbles, icing, chocolate, it’s such a simple recipe that makes such a good treat! I’m so glad I didn’t have to waste a whole batch of cupcakes, and instead, make something that was even more delicious. Thank you so much for your advice Rosy 🙂

Everyone please check out her blog! She has her own company called “Rosy’s Bake Shoppe, ” and she also makes a lot of dinner recipes.

Easy Homemade Cake Pops Recipe

*If you baked your own cake, let the cake cool completely before you start crumbling it. Otherwise, the cake will stick together because there is a lot of moisture and heat

2. Knead the cake crumbles with icing until the mixture is able to stand by itself without crumbling (you can try rolling some into balls at this point to see if they break or not). I’m not giving any measurements because it really depends on the type of “mistake” had. If it’s too dry, use more icing. If it’s too moist (like my batch), use less icing.

3. Roll the dough into balls about 2-3cm thick depending on whether you’re making a cake pop or ball. Cake pops are usually bigger than cake balls.

Cake Balls: How To Turn A Fail Cake Into A Delicious Dessert

*Don’t make the ball too big for the cake pop, or else it might fall off the stick when you are dipping it in chocolate

*Cake pops: Dab the end of a stick into melted chocolate and then stick it halfway through the cake ball before you place everything in the fridge

5. Melt chocolate using proper chocolate melting techniques. Place the ball into the chocolate and use a spoon to smother it with chocolate. Shake the spoon around to get the excess chocolate off

Tricks To Make Cake Pops More Easily

*Cake pops: Dip the cake-end into the chocolate and use a spoon to round the chocolate. Be careful not to press too hard, or else the whole cake will fall off the stick

*Cake pops: You can either insert the stick into a colander or make your own Styrofoam tray for it to try and serveWhen my son was getting ready to turn three, he told me about three months in advance that he wanted a bee party. In researching bee parties, I saw several version of bee cake pops that looked adorable. Things like these cute bee pops from Bakerella:

Our first mis-step happened early on. We prepared our mix and greased the pan with coconut oil but forgot to dust it with flour. This caused most of our first batch cake pops to stick to the pan and therefore rip in half when we separated the pieces to remove them. We got batch 2 just about perfect.

How To Make Best Cake Pops Recipe For Lazy People

Once we successfully created round cake balls, we melted our yellow candy wafers. We let them get super thin and runny (can't have clumpy cake pops!). They were so runny, though, that the candy didn't stick to the cake pop and ran off into the pan instead. Of course because the candy was runny, it also didn't provide great glue for the white candy melts we'd cut in half to serve as wings:

Instead of dipping the end of the lollipop sticks in the candy before putting them in the cake balls, we just popped them in. This, of course, didn't give the cake balls an effective way to stick to the sticks and they were not stable (note the stick starting to protrude from the cake pop pictured above). We tried to compensate for this by inverting the cake pops onto a candy wafer to serve as a stable base. Hey! I'd seen it on Pinterest. Surely it would work:

Luckily, this is the one thing I did NOT do. I had given up hope of having bee pops and had walked out of the kitchen with a tray of zom-bees to take photos for my friend, Heather, who runs Craft Fail. While I was gone, Niina figured out some magical way to get the candy to stick to the cake balls and for the bees to not look like they were dying so we DID have some half decent looking bee pops for the party afterall.

Easy Vanilla Cake Pops Recipe With Cake Pops Maker

But like I said....I have no idea how she pulled it off. Something about letting the candy cool a bit first before dipping and sticking the wings. We also skipped the creepy white eyes and added details with a black frosting bag.

If you really want to make your own cake pops, check out this tutorial over on Master Cake Baker, Ashlee's site: I'm Topsy Turvy. (technically the tute is for angry birds cake pops but you'll at least get the basics)