My best friend is hosting a sprinkle for the new baby and I though I’d try my hand at making a little something special that I had never made before: Cake Pops. I know these hardly qualify as “real food” but we’ll try our hand at converting to a crunchier alternative once we get the fundamentals down! I watched about a dozen tutorials on how to do it and this is what I came up with to make it the most simple experience. I completely ruined the first half of my cake pop batch through trial and error, so it looks like there won’t be enough pops to take to the event. But, hey! I know how to do these puppies from here on out.

You need:
One boxed cake- baked
One tub of pre-made frosting
30 pop sticks
2 bags of Wilton’s Candy Melts
Piece of styrofoam
Mini ice cream scoop

Start with baking and cooling the cake.
Once the cake is completely cooled use your fingers to crumble it into a fine grain.

hand-crumbled cake

Next, spoon in a little less than 1/3 of the container of frosting. This is essentially two giant spoonfuls. DO NOT use too much frosting. Mix in the frosting to the crumbled cake with your fingers. It becomes a dough-like blob that you can shape.

Frosting and cake mixed

Now use the mini ice cream scoop to measure out uniform amounts of the mixture. Use your hands to roll into tight, solid balls.

Cake balls

Melt about a quarter cup of the candy melts in a glass cup.

Candy melts

Melted candy

Dip about 3/4 of an inch of the ends of the pop sticks in the melted candy.

Pop stick dipped in melted candy

Insert into cake balls. Freeze for half hour. This will keep the sticks from coming out of cake balls when you candy coat them.

Cake balls with sticks

Melt a tall glass full of the candy melts. I did this in the microwave – took about a minute and twenty seconds. I did this in twenty second increments. I originally tried to use white chocolate chips and this was a disaster. They melted too thick and thats how I ruined half of these cake pops.
Remove cake balls from the freezer and dip one at a time in the melted candy.

Dip cake balls

Dip them down far enough in the tall cup that the candying on the stick is covered. Gently twist the cake pop as you bring it out of the melted candy. Poke the cake pop stick into the styrofoam block and allow the candy to harden. Super easy cake pops! The next time I make these I plan do do so baking a cake from scratch with Real Food ingredients and using stevia-sweetened cream cheese for the “frosting”. I’m at a loss for what to do to reduce the refined sugar content in the candy melts. I’d love to hear ideas on good substitutes!