Cake Pops have been “having a moment” for quite some time, and we gotta say that we aren’t upset about it. Why? Because in many ways, cake pops are the perfect dessert. With a light crunch through their chocolate exterior, your taste buds are transported to a magical land of gooey cake mixed with frosting. We like to think of it as love at first bite.
It’s not that simple, however. Cake Pops are also amazing desserts because they are so incredibly versatile, not just in terms of flavor, but also in terms of design. You have a specific theme for your party or event? Not to worry, we can create a multitude of custom styles to make the desserts for your party exciting and fun!
Customizing Cake Pops
As with any custom dessert, we start the design process by consulting with our client(s) in order to understand what their event will be like, what kind of look they’re trying to achieve and of course, what their favorite cake flavor is.
It can be a unique challenge to incorporate cake pops into a theme, given how small of a surface area you have to work with. That said, I always feel excited by the opportunity to create something new and fun that will fit perfectly within a client’s theme. And who doesn’t love a challenge?!
When it comes to shaping your cake pops, nothing works better than rolling them with your hands. If you’re having trouble getting them completely round, try chilling them in the refrigerator for a few minutes. We recommend starting your balls with a .75oz ice cream scoop to ensure consistency between your pops. You can pick one up on Amazon for only $6. However, if you need a specific shape, My Little Cake Pop Molds are a dream come true. For example, we use the heart-shaped mold to create our Love-ly cake pops.
The finishing touches on cake pops might be our favorite part! Silicon molds are all the rage these days and as we’ve mentioned previously, these can be helpful for creating fondant details. We always try to add finishing touches with candy (ie. pretzel antlers on our reindeer cake pops), but sometimes only fondant will do the trick. Whether it’s painting on some gold eyelashes on our unicorn cake pops or brushing gold leaf onto our brushed gold cake pops, the last touches are what really bring the cake pop to life. There’s no better example of that than with our Halloween Cake Pops!
Halloween Cake Pop Designs
At 12 Oaks, we love designing custom cake pops, but there’s something about Halloween that just sparks inspiration and we absolutely love creating custom Halloween cake pops! Here are some examples of our Halloween products:
These Spooky Halloween Cake Pops are our classic designs. This product gives clients a mix of tiny, creepy-crawly spiders, mummies and ghosts for an awesomely spooky party tablescape. The 12 Oaks team is especially fond of the ghost, which is made by laying fondant over the cake pop and painting the frightened face on with edible paint. A little scary, a lot sweet, we just can’t get enough of the Halloween Cake Pops.
These are some of our newer designs. Halloween Spiders and Halloween Bats offer a spooky, but modern twist on Halloween treats. The bats are made from fondant; however, the spiders are made by hand and if you have a lot of them, we’d definitely recommend getting a mold! So many little legs to roll otherwise! We also used heated marshmallow to create the “spiderwebs”. We loved this effect, but it was definitely a difficult and sticky medium to work with – be patient. For the bats, we used Poppy Paints to “paint” a night sky and then added some edible stars (a favorite of ours). We also love using different Halloween-esque straws instead of the regular sticks with these to make them even more fun.
Tips for the Home Baker
If you’re creating cake pops on your own, here are a couple of tried and true tips to keep in mind:
- Make sure that you cool down the cake completely before you add any frosting and try to shape into balls. If you’re working with warm cake, it’ll be much harder to hold the shape you’re looking for.
- If you want to create your own special cake pop shape, you can make shaped cake balls by flattening your cake mixture into a slab and using a small cookie cutter to cut out shapes.
- It is super important to buy quality candy melt to coat the exterior of your cake pop. If you buy regular chocolate, you will need to temper it which just adds another step to the already long process of making cake pops. After trying about every brand imaginable, our go-to is Merckens. It’s always consistently good. Unfortunately, they are not as easy to find as Wilton candy melts which are at most craft stores. Wilton is OK if you’re in a pinch, but the taste is subpar and it’s much harder to work with. You’ll likely need to add a lot of shortening or paramount crystals to them.
- Make sure to dip your lollipop stick or firm straw into a tiny bit of the candy melt, insert it into your cake ball and finally let it dry. This will help keep the cake pop on the stick.
- If you’re going to add sprinkles you’ll need to alternate between dipping the cake pops and adding the sprinkles. You’ll only be able to dip 2-3 cake pops before they will dry, so be sure to put the sprinkles on before that. Once they dry, you’ll be out of luck to add any sprinkles.
Remember: if you’re not in the mood for trying your own hand at making cake pops, you can always get ours delivered straight to you door for any special occasion!
Yours sweetly,
Missy & Katherine
