Cake Pops. . .the story of a failed dessert

I cook a lot, and with cooking a lot I have found the more I cook, the better I am, but inevitably there are still failures that occur with anything new that you may try. After eating a couple cake pops from Starbucks, looking at a number of books that detail how to make various cute and artistic versions to make a cake pop look like anything from a duck to a mini cake and perusing pinterest, I was convinced that I too would be able to make beautiful cake pops, and while I thought making them look like an animal would be too time consuming (note, I had full confidence that I could make them look like ornate animals if I wanted to spend the time. . .)

This is what I was going for. . .

This is what I made. . .

 

 

So, I made some cake pop, the cake was good, I used a box funfetti mix, since I knew the cake would be demolished I couldn't see putting the time in to make it from scratch. . .I refuse to use canned frosting, so i opted to try a peanut butter marshmallow cream filling, it actually turned out fine too. I mashed the cake, added the filling, shaped the balls and froze them to set, then things started to go downhill. Turns out, if you have too much filing and not enough cake in your cake balls, they don't become solid enough, so covering them in candy melts becomes an impossible task. As you can see from the photos, I could not get it completly cover the cake ball without using massive amounts of candy coating each, and the ones I did that with started to weigh so much, they started to fall apart.

So, after several hours of effort, lots of dishes and a colorful sticky mess, we ended up going out to buy a Dairy Queen cake. Not my pick of dessert, I tend to prefer cake to ice cream, so I would have been happy with a Cold Stone ice cream cake if I had to go the ice cream cake route, but I was overruled. I have a round cake covered in fondant with decorative pigs planned for this weekend, cross your fingers and wish me luck.