Cake Pops

A blog called Bakerella came up with a neat idea called "cake pops".  They are essentially a mix of cake and frosting rolled into a ball, put on a stick, and dipped in chocolate.   They have become pretty trendy and I decided to try my hand at making them.
At the bakery where I work, we throw away A LOT of cake tops when we trim the cake layers.  I took some of these scraps home and made cake pops with them.  Waste not, want not.

First make the cream cheese frosting-

Ingredients:

8 oz (a pound) cream cheese

4 oz (1/2 stick) butter

2 cups powdered sugar

1/2 Teaspoon vanilla extract

1 Tablespoon milk

1) Make sure the butter and cream cheese are softened the same amount and cream them together using a hand mixer.  

2) Add in the powdered sugar in two additions to prevent it from flying everywhere.

3) Add the milk and extract.

If you don't want to make the frosting you can just but a pint tub of pre-made stuff.  The next part is harder for me to describe amounts since I used cake tops from vanilla, chocolate and red velvet cakes.  Let's say you need about the amount of cake from one cake box(that's what other recipes usually say).  Bake the cakes and allow them to fully cool.  Blend them up in a food processor until they are fine crumbs.

Add the frosting to the cake crumbs and fully mix. They should be a moldable consistency.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least one hour.  At this point you can also freeze the mixture and just take it out when you want to make the cake pops.  

Next, roll the mixture into tablespoon sized balls and stick a lollipop stick into them and freeze them so they harden (about a 1/2 hour).  

Then in a double boiler (or a metal bowl placed on top of a pot with a few inches of water) melt whatever coating you want to coat the cake pops in: any kind of chocolate, candy melts, etc.  

Also have sprinkles or whatever you want to decorate them with ready. 

Dip and decorate.  You may want to only remove a few from the freezer at a time because if they thaw out too much, dipping gets more difficult.  I made Chocolate dipped in Peanut Butter, Red velvet in white chocolate, and vanilla dipped in dark chocolate.

Here's a link to some pictures of more intricate ones that people have come up with:http://www.bakerella.com/?s=cake+pops

This recipe makes a boatload of these suckers so I just rolled out a couple and coated them, then froze the rest of the "batter" for later use.  Store finished pops in an airtight container at room temperature or in the freezer.