As you might tell, I’m having a blast with these Pinbusted or Pintrusted posts! I didn’t realize how powerful Pinterest can be when used with a goal in mind.
For example, I have a Nyan Cat birthday party board, which I used to plan for my youngest son’s birthday party earlier this year.
Last summer, my oldest son requested a Harry Potter birthday party. We were on the heels of Dragon*Con, when he had a magical experience as a pretty-darned-good award-winning Yule-Ball-attending Harry Potter, so of course I started a Harry Potter birthday cake board on Pinterest. When I found this Pinterest pin for “Golden Snitch Cake Pops” I thought: I can do this for my son.
I’ve been a Bakerella fan for years. Her cake pops are works of art! I am the proud owner of the original Cake Pops cookbook. (GeekMom Judy reviewed it a couple years ago.) I can’t be sure Bakerella invented the cake pop (her post where she first thought about sticking a stick in a cake ball is very cute), but she certainly brought them — and the ability to make them — to the masses.
But all these years, I never made cake pops. For my sons, though, I’ll try anything!
While I didn’t do the butterbeer flavored cake as suggested in the pin (my kids don’t care for it, after having tasted it at Harry Potter World at Universal’s Islands of Adventure earlier in 2012), I did follow the guidance on how to mix the crumbled cake with icing, roll the cake pop balls, and attempt to dip them in melted candy melts.
It didn’t go well at all. I couldn’t get the cake balls to stay on the sticks, nor could I maintain the correct consistency for the candy melt to dip the cakes properly. I used Wilton gold-colored “Color Mist” product to turn the pops gold. At least that part was easy.
I like to think I’m a pretty good cook/chef/baker. I can’t say whether it was the humidity or just my incompetence, but this whole process was incredibly frustrating for me. How does Bakerella make it look so easy? It must be my incompetence: thousands of people — besides Bakerella — have successfully made them, right?
I had no problem rolling out the gum paste to cut out the wings, but I had a hard time keeping the wings on the cakes, even though I made a point to cut one side of each wing to fit into the pop. Out of 36 cake pops, I could only get the wings to stay on about six of them.
Did the kids mind? No. Did the cake pops taste good? Yes, I think they did. In the grand scheme of things, was my son’s birthday ruined because the cake pops came out a little lumpy? No, not at all.
Pinbusted or Pintrusted? For me, pinbusted! Call it the perfectionist in me. However, I have friends who have done perfectly successful cake pops. Perhaps this is one of those instances where practice makes perfect. I know I can do this. Time to break out the candy melts!
Show us your cake pops! Go to our Facebook and/or Twitter pages and upload pictures of your cake pop successes and failures. Be sure to tag @GeekMomBlog on Twitter!
I’m going to pin this page. One thing I saw recently SOMEWHERE which I thought was brilliant was instead of doing cake using cake donut holes or glazed donut holes and then dipping them in frosting of some sort. The consistency of course wouldn’t be the same, but they’d work a LOT better in this instance. Plus kids aren’t picky and you could get exactly how many you needed fresh or day old from a local bakery (whichever would work better) and any ‘oopses’ would be breakfast food. win/win!