Halloween Cake Pops

I was recently sent the Bakerella Cake Pops book for my birthday and couldn’t wait to get started on these little gems! If you’ve never heard of them before, don’t worry. I only recently found out about them and have been itching to try them since but needed the motivation to actually get going!

I’m not going to bother writing how to make them here, or the ingredients you need, as Holly (of GBBO fame) has done a much better job of this on her fab blog here. But everything is available now in the UK: things such as the candy melts are readily bought in hobbycraft, the tubs of frosting in Asda, etc. so sourcing of ‘the right stuff’ has become much easier since this idea caught on.

I began by making the cake mixture itself and leaving to set. I chose round pumpkins and frilly ghosts.

Next I melted the candy and inserted the pop-sticks and left again to cool. I had big issues with the melts being far too thick, but since I began with the ghosts, this didn’t really matter as they could easily become wrinkly ghosts. The next day when I used the orange ones for the pumpkins, I put it in for much less time and stirred to help the remnants dissolve. This gave a far runnier liquid and smoother finish to the pumpkins though I still found it incredibly difficult to achieve a smoothness all over, without any of the thicker drips. Having researched this, many people seem to use Trex to thin the melts, or you could just as easily use a little vegetable oil to do the trick. I think the key to it is probably practise and slightly smaller pops.

I had also bought an edible pen with which to draw on the faces, but this proved disastrous as the pen just would not work on the dried melts. I think it’s more meant to be used on rice paper and actual icing, rather than a chocolate-type substitute. I ended up using a tube of writing icing, but couldn’t be as precise as I’d have liked with this. Next time, I’ll just stick to decoration with ready made bits and pieces, in fact, I’ve already bought some Christmassy ones and decided to coat them with chocolate rather than candy melts.