I'd read a lot about cake pops on others' baking blogs and enjoyed looking at pictures of various impressive chocolate-clad-cakes-in-miniature-on-sticks (or CCCIMOS as they might be referred to). Whilst I didn't doubt that they tasted great, and, evidently, they can look stunning, I always thought they sounded a bit faffy to make, and wondered whether I could justify the hours in the kitchen if the outcome was just 12 mini mouthfuls. Going to the trouble of baking a lovely cake only to put it in a food processor and reduce it to crumbs as a preliminary activity seemed a bit long-winded and labour intensive to me. As I've implied, I have a sneaky suspicion that cake pops might be "totes gim" (a total gimmick) as my friend Esther might say. Style over substance. Something and nothing. As such, I was in no rush to give them a go, however, I stumbled upon a cheats' recipe involving pre-bought biscuits so thought I'd give that a go. The following recipe is for 12 x Oreo, Nutella and white chocolate cake pops.
Ingredients:
1 x Packet of Oreo cookies
c. 5 x tablespoons of Nutella
100g of White Chocolate
12 Cake Pop Sticks
nonpareils/hundreds and thousands (or similar) for decoration
Method:
1) Using a food processor, blitz the Oreo cookies until you are left with fine, dark crumbs.
2) Add the Nutella to the crumbs and blend until a dough (of sorts) is formed.
3) Take a small amount of dough, and roll into a cake pop-sized ball (I found this bit really messy as the Nutella is of such a wet, sticky consistency!)
4) Roll 12 x Oreo-Nutella pops.
5) Freeze for 15 minutes. When the pops have less than 5 mins chilling time, carefully melt the white chocolate. Take care not to burn it (remember white chocolate burns more easily than milk/dark chocolate).
6) Dip one end of each stick into the melted chocolate, then push into the pop. Re-freeze for c. 5 minutes.
7) Dip each of the pops in the melted chocolate, and once the chocolate encrusted ball(!) has cooled, dip it into your nonpareils.
My CCCIMOS
Totes gim?
The verdict:
Quite nice. But assuming that you like the constituent ingredients, what's not to like? My other half (who is the extremely professional hand model in the above picture) approved of my chocolately comestibles... but then he might have just been being polite.
I don't think I'll rush to make them again. I can think of plenty of other bakes/confections that I would gladly make again before I bothered with these. This was the low-faff version and yet I still found it quite a bit of faff (and messy!) What do you think of cake pops? Faffy, faddy or fabby?
