Happy New Year! I hope everyone has had a great start to 2014 so far

I spent New Years Eve at a friend’s house for a small party, and after using my new cake pop machine for the first time, arrived with about 20 cake pops in my arms!! As this was a little bit of a trial run I wanted to keep things simple, so made vanilla sponge cakes & covered them with red Candy Melts and some very simple decoration. Making the cakes was easy enough – I used a recipe specifically for use in a cake pop machine, and was very impressed when after just 4 minutes of cooking time, I was able to easily remove 12 little round cakes from the machine…! The trouble came with the icing!! The instructions simply said to melt the Candy Melts, and then to dip the cake pops in, and remove the excess icing.. Unfortunately the icing was far too thick, and it took me quite a while to get the right consistency. The picture below shows my test runs – beginning on the right hand side – and it can be seen how the icing got progressively smoother & tidier on the pop as I got closer & closer to the right consistency. It was lucky I made so many extra pops!!

Practice runs covering cake pops

By the time I managed to get this right, I didn’t have a lot of time for decoration unfortunately. So for most of the cake pops, I just sprinkled them with coloured sugar sprinkles, and I kept a few pops back to ice ‘Happy New Year’ on to. Yet this wasn’t without problem either! I melted some different Candy Melts, which were white with coloured flecks in, and used this to fill my piping bag and set about pipping letters on top of the pops… Unfortunately the icing was too thick & after just a few letters my tip clogged & I had to give up! As a quick back up, I managed to use a white icing pen & just write ‘New Year 2014′ which did the job but it didn’t look as impressive as I had hoped.  Luckily I was given a wonderful stand as a Christmas present, so when I turned up to the party it looked quite a good display!

Vanilla Cake Pops