I hope everyone is having a good weekend so far. Mine has actually been pretty great. For one of my school friend's birthdays, Andrew and I went on a "Distillery Row" tour today, touring and tasting at 3 different distilleries here in Portland. I absolutely love Portland for reasons like this and can actually not believe Andrew and I haven't done this sooner. We've gone to tons of breweries and wineries, even a sakery--but we have yet to do this. I love learning about how things are made and then getting to taste all the different variations. After tasting quite a few different vodkas, gins (eww), and whiskeys, we ended up bringing home a hot pepper infused vodka from New Deal. This place was my favorite of the 3, mostly because it had creatively infused vodkas--even a chocolate one! We chose the Hot Monkey b/c of its interesting taste and think we can use it to put a new twist on some basic mixed drinks. It is really, REALLY, spicy, but makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside :)
After the distillery tastings, we ate dinner at a brewpub and then came home and curled up in front of our first fire of the season and watched a movie. Its been a nice and relaxing weekend so far, even though I will be working all day tomorrow on schoolwork....But, I'll procrastinate a little longer from getting started on that by posting about red velevet cake pops.
My friend's birthday that we celebrated yesterday was actually on Wednesday of this past week. I had been wanting a good excuse to make cake pops for some time and thought that this would be the perfect one. It was also good to know that the pops wouldn't just be sitting around my house for me to devour on my own--instead, this would be a good way to share. So, I brought them and passed them out to my morning class on Wednesday. And boy, were they a hit! Seriously, people kept coming up to me and telling me how good they were and that I should go into a "side" business making them. Ha! In all my spare time.....Plus, I'm not so sure I ever want to make them again because, man, were they annoying! It might be because I'm chocolate-melting-illiterate, but I could not get the chocolate the right consistency to make dipping easy. It ended up taking too much time to dip each one, and they didn't come out as pretty as I would have liked. Bakerella makes it look so easy--it actually made me kind of mad at her.
The whole process seems like it should be a piece of cake (ha!). You start by baking a regular old cake box mix. After its done baking and completely cooled, you crumble it into pieces in a large bowl and mix it with 1 can of frosting. It looks something like this, if you all remember. Messy, messy--but really fun.
You then roll little pieces of the cake into balls and place them on a wax-lined cookie sheet. I popped them into the freezer for about 15 min to let them harden a little. In the meantime, melt a package of chocolate bark or candy melts for dipping. I chose candy melts b/c I thought they would be easier to work with. I tried melting them in the microwave first, but apparently they got too hot and the chocolate just started to harden. I might have just been impatient with melting them and heated them up too quickly. Luckily I had gotten an extra bag of chocolate just in case I had difficulty. I moved to melting this bag on the stove--double boiler style. This worked a lot better, but it still wasn't as liquidy as I wanted it to be. I just had to go with it, though.
Next, I pulled the cake balls out of the freezer, dipped the tip of a lollipop stick into the melted chocolate, and inserted the stick into the cake ball, making sure not to go more than half way. I then dipped the cake ball into the melted chocolate, making sure to cover the entire ball. Because the chocolate wasn't as liquidy as I wanted it to be, I had to use a spoon to cover the area around the lollipop stick (you don't want to swirl the cake ball into the chocolate, or it will crumble off). Its really important that no cake is exposed--or else cake will squeeze out of the exposed areas when its cooling (I think that dipping the tip of the lollipop stick into chocolate first before inserting into the cake ball really helps with that, as it helps to create a seal around the cake).
Then, you lightly tap the excess chocolate off the cake pop, making sure to rotate the cake pop as you do this (or the cake will begin to slide off). After the cake pop is completely covered, you insert the lollipop stick into a styrofoam block (I got both the candy melts and the styrofoam block from a craft store). I cut the styrofoam to fit inside a cake carrier so that I could easily transport the pops. It worked amazingly! Here's what the finished product looked like.
Here they are all ready to go!
This is one with a bite taken out! (fyi, this particular cake pop was one of the "rejects", so the chocolate isn't as smooth as the others)
I thought they tasted really good too, despite the mess and the effort it took to make them! Here's a cake pop instructional video by Bakerella--this helped a lot when I was making them. If anyone does attempt to make these, please let me know how they turn out and if/how you had better luck with the chocolate. Have a good rest of the weekend!!
