Cake Pop Recipe

Louie has been dreaming up his own cake recipes all weekend, making pretend cakes in his kitchen, in the bath, with his playdough, you name it. So I thought it might be a bit of fun to make cake pops with him. He requested chocolate but I am sure you can use whatever combination you like.

First things first is a simple sponge cake. I use my Grandmother's recipe (apparently!) whereby I weigh the eggs and use the same quantities of egg, butter, sugar and self raising flour. For me, it is completely fool proof. When making a chocolate sponge as below, I measure a little less flour and make it up with a good quality cocoa. I like the Green and Blacks cocoa, yum yum!
Spread the mixture into a shallow rectangular tin/tray and bake for around 15-20 minutes on 180oC .

 Once your sponge has cooled, you can start to have fun. Take a large bowl and begin to break the sponge into breadcrumb sized pieces. Its really easy and the kids can get involved so easily. Whilst Louie did this, I set to work on the cream cheese frosting which acts as a binding agent.
I used 25g butter and 150g icing sugar which I beat with the Kitchenaid. Once that resembled breadcrumbs, add 125g of cream cheese. Beat until smooth and creamy but not runny.

Then you can begin adding this to the cake mixture. I started off dollop by dollop as I was effectively making it up as I went along. I suppose it depends how much cake you have!

 It finally comes together beautifully and you are ready to begin shaping the mixture in to balls. I used an ice cream scoop to help start off the shape, and to try and give a uniform to the size of the balls (didn't work...!).  I found squashing the mixture quite tight before rolling into a ball made the balls stick together rather than breaking apart.

Then you can stick the sticks in. Try not to stick them all the way through as it makes it rather tricky when you are decorating. Trial and error lead us to that one, thanks Lou!

 Then you can pop them in the fridge for around two hours to set. Meanwhile, you can practice some more with playdough versions.

When they are feeling quite firm, you can begin decorating. I assumed that just coating them with chocolate would work but it was a little tricky. I used two of the larger bars of chocolate and that covered 9 pops.

 Et voila!