The Chocolate Project

....as promised here.

Sweet Girlie cousins!

If you read blogs much you know that these are not original with me. In fact, I'm probably far enough behind the times that I may be at risk for boring some of you with ANOTHER cake pop post. I first saw the idea on  this blog. Yes, that says Valentines Treats, it takes me a little while to get to my ideas sometimes. Of course when I was ready to make them I couldn't remember where I had first seen them, so I collected tips from all over Google before I started. Here's how it worked out for me....

TAKE

...One 9x13 cake (yup, straight outta the box, I suppose it would be more "homemakerish" of me to make it from scratch but by the time it's all doctored up I don't think it'd be any better) baked, cooled (completely) and crumbled.

...Add Half a can of bought icing. (again, you could do the Martha Stewart thing and make you own. In fact I usually don't care for the bought stuff much but it works for me here.) Many of the blogs I read used a whole can but the first site I read said this made problems for her so I stuck with a half as per her advise.

I decided to go with chocolate overload on these but you can use any cake/icing combo you like. (I also did white cake with Betty Crocker's Strawberry Mist icing. They were cute and nice and girlie pink but there's NO substitute for CHOCOLATE!!)

....Mix Well!

....Just for fun I stirred in about a cup of mini chocolate chips. I was serious about that overload bit!! I'd love to try other goodies too, nuts, toffee chips......Mmm!

When it's mixed well, dig in, get your hands messy and start rolling into balls. I used my #60 cookie scoop for a head start. Somewhere (no idea where anymore) I found a tip that recommended dipping the stick in a bit of chocolate before inserting them into the cake balls to give them a sturdier start.

When the sticks are firmly in place and the balls are super cold. Your ready for some melted coating chocolate and ooey, gooey, messy, chocolatey, dipping fun.

I had a bit of trouble with the temperature of the cake balls. If they're not cold they turn into mush and fall off the sticks while you try to coat them. They dip beautifully when they are frozen but then I had trouble with the chocolate cracking as it got hard. So getting a happy medium "frozeness" was definitely my biggest challenge of the whole project.

Styrofoam covered in foil works great for holding them as they dry.

These are all sprinkled with nonpareils but I also did some with chocolate drizzle,

just in case they weren't quite chocolatey enough! :o)

Found this black and white crock at Goodwill for a couple of bucks and it was great for making

an arrangement for our

Mother Daughter Banquet Dessert Buffet.

Finished Product

almost too pretty to eat....ALMOST!

 

This was a super fun project but it did take MUCH longer than I thought it would. Not because it was that difficult it was just time consuming. I got about 45 pops out of each cake mix and I made 2 kinds so I guess making almost a hundred of anything isn't gonna happen in a few minutes. Next time I will start much earlier in the day. Chocolate is much more fun to play with when it's not the middle of the night!!

When the going gets tough the tough eat chocolate!! :o)