2 Bites of Awesomeness! {Cake Pops}

Who likes to eat cake? (raises hands)
Who likes to eat cake with built in frosting AND covered in chocolatey goodness?
How about with a sprinklin' of candies and chocolates?
Sound good? Well here's a recipe you're going to be making over and over. Yeah, they're THAT good.

Cake pops are very simple to make.
Here's what you'll need:
1 box of your favorite cake mix (mine is Duncan Hines Golden Butter)
1 can of your favorite frosting
Parchment paper
Candies for coating
lollipop sticks (found at craft stores)
sprinkles, chocolate bits
Saucepan
Heat proof bowl
Cookie Sheet
Styrofoam blocks

You are going to prepare you cake as usual. Bake it and let it cool. Take it and crumble it into a large bowl. You will then take 3/4 of the can of frosting and mash it all together with your hands. I find that I rinse my hands off a few times to take the sticky-ness off them.
Take some of the cake/frosting mixture and form into balls about 1 inch.
Put them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Then stick them in the freezer.
Meanwhile, take your candy and start to slowly melt it by putting them in the heat safe bowl over a sauce pan filled with water. Heat until smooth and melted but not scorched or sticky. The store also carries some candy that is microwaveable in its own container. I've used both and the MW one is just more convenient as you can just throw out the container when done. Make sure you power your MW at 50% power or your candy coating will scorch.
Once your candy is smooth and melted, bring out your cake balls. Take one popsickle stick dip the tip in the melted candy and stick into cakeball about 1/4 of the way in. Dip the cakepop in candy and softly tap your hand to drip off excess. If you see the cakeballs start to get warm, simply stick them back in the freezer. You DO NOT want them soft as they will start to fall off the stick. If you'd like to have sprinkles on them take the pop while still "wet" and dip it into your sprinkles.

After coating and tapping, place your cakepop into styrofoam to cool and set. (Tip: don't remove the plastic wrapping from your styrofoam. This makes less of a mess and you can use them over and over by just wiping it clean.)

This time I decided to make my cakepops look like a flower. I simply cut out a heart shape on my Cricut about 2 3/4 inches but you can hand draw them and cut them out of cardstock. I then hole punched the tip of the heart slightly bent it at the middle like shown below.

Slide it into the cake pop stick and hold in place with a bit of tape.

Tie a pretty ribbon around it and it's ready for gift giving :)

I ran out of lollipop sticks so I just used popsicle sticks instead.  I made some by pressing a Sweetheart candy into the center of some pops. Some pops had Ghirardelli dark chocolate chunks coating them.
These are always a hit. Two bites and you're done :)



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