Halloween Cake Pops

I hope I’m not running before I can walk, but I think I may have finally cracked Cake Pops!! I’ve talked here so many times about not being able to master them – I’ve still got a long way to go before they are perfect but I’m more than a little bit pleased with my Halloween Cake Pops.

Last week, Dr Oetker asked if I’d like to use some of their products to make their Ghost Cake Pops. My first thought was to decline knowing that I’ve never been successful at them yet but being the stubborn mule that I am, I took the challenge head on.

I did a fair bit of googling to see if there were any tips that I could follow – The biggest difference I came across was to have the cake mixture still quite crumbly and not use very much buttercream/frosting. I think this is where I have been going wrong – my pops were just too heavy and kept popping off the sticks – even with dipping the end of the sticks in melted chocolate to help them stick.

I decided to stick with my good old faithful madeira cake recipe as I know it so well and used a really firm buttercream using cold real butter. I was sent 2 bags of white chocolate drops to use for the covering – The Dr Oetker drops are tiny which work really well when melting them. They melt before the mixture either burns or turns unusable which so easily happens when melting white chocolate. I also added 1 tbsp of Trex Vegetable Fat (Try not to think about it too much!) to the white chocolate to make it runnier and easier to coat the pops. Worked brilliantly!

I used Dr Oetker black Food Gel for the decorations – It has a nozzle to pipe it on but I prefer to paint it for really small details.

I felt so much safer covering the pops knowing that I was going to cover them again with a layer of sugar paste – I used a Garrett Frill Cutter to make the Ghost’s cape.
Then I got a bit braver and used ‘Naked’ Cake Pops dusted with Orange food dust for the pumpkins. I piped melted white chocolate over the cake pops to make the Mummies. I’m so chuffed with them!