Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
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Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
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About the Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
Ideas How to Use Your Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
Cake Pop Cookbooks, Supplies and Accessories
Cake Pop Tutorial Videos
About the Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
The traditional method for making cake pops is to bake a cake, crumble it into a fine crumb, add a large amount of frosting to it, scoop and form each cake pop by hand, cool, insert the lollipop sticks, then dip in melted chocolate, let harden, then decorate. Personally, if I’m going to put that much time and effort into a dessert, and given the ratio of frosting to cake, consume that much sugar and so many calories, I’d rather made a ganache and make chocolate truffles instead. But there is a new alternative that is faster, easier and allows you and your family to spend your time decorating the cake pops instead: the Babycakes cake pop maker.
Now what it produces is not the traditional cake pop. The way it works is very simple: plug in the machine to warm up, mix up the batter (recipes are included, or you can experiment with your own, although the lighter and fluffier your cake batter, the less successful the cake pops will be), scoop about a tablespoon of batter into each small circle in the cooking surface, close the lid, wait a couple of minutes, check the cake pops for doneness, then unplug the machine and remove the pops with the included fork tool. Cool the cake pops, dips the lollipop sticks about a half inch into melted chocolate, insert into each cake pop, let harden in place, then decorate as you would a traditional cake pop. Like all other baking, you’ll probably have to do a little experimentation, especially if you’re using your own cake recipe or a cake mix instead of recipes designed for a cake pop maker, figure out what you like best to add the batter to the cake pop machine, exactly how much batter is just the right amount, how long to cook each kind of cake, but the basic process couldn’t be simpler, and the results couldn’t be much faster. Clean up is pretty basic and quick.
The cake pop maker comes with the machine, instruction manual, a fork tool to test the doneness of the pops and remove them, some lollipop sticks and a cake pop cooling and decorating stand that holds 12 pops. If you’d like to read the instructional manual for the cake pop maker before buying it, or so that you can make sure you have all your ingredients on hand before it arrives, its actually available as a PDF online: Babycakes Cake Pop Maker Instruction Manual
Ideas How to Use Your Babycakes Cake Pop Maker
- Satisfy Your Family’s Sweet Tooth Much Faster and For Less Money. Most people have a sweet tooth and want to indulge it periodically. Ice cream never lasts for long in our refrigerator, and good quality ice cream is expensive, same for commercial candy, trips to the store take time and waste gas, brownies take 45 minutes to bake, my favorite banana bread recipe takes an hour, and my favorite pound cake recipe requires advance preparation, takes a long time to prepare and an hour and a half to bake. Baking your own sweets are less expensive, you can keep all the ingredients on hand ready to make at a whim, your kids can participate, you get to control what goes into your sweets – and what doesn’t – and with cake pops, there’s automatic portion size. Cake pops take less than five minutes to cook, and what’s especially nice during hot summers, you won’t have to heat up your whole oven – and your kitchen – in the process.
- Bake With Your Kids or Grandkids. Making and decorating cake pops together with your kids or grandkids would be a fun, entertaining project for a weekend afternoon or a school holiday, or to make fun, inexpensive edible gifts for their friends and classmates for Valentine’s Day, Halloween or Christmas. And it costs you nothing more than the price of the ingredients and a little electricity. Cake pops can be dipped in colorful sprinkles, crushed candy or cookies, or if you want to make them fancier and more detailed, you can paint them using Edible Paint for Cakes
. Gift cake pops can be placed in Clear Lollipop Bags
, tied with some colorful gift ribbon, and they’ll be absolutely beautiful gifts to give to the kids’ teachers, friends and schoolmates.
- Throw a Cake Pop Birthday or Halloween Party. Rather than spending a lot more money on a bakery or store bought birthday / sheet cake, which may contain a lot of preservatives or even shortening in the icing (ick) which you don’t want kids to eat, make cake pops for the kids. You can make the cake pops in advance, or if you need another kids activity to make your birthday party special and different, you can dip all your cake pops in their candy coating in advance, allow them to harden, and then let the kids decorate the cake pops themselves with candy sprinkles, crushed cookie crumbs, edible paint, or icing in small Ziploc bags with holes at the edge for piping. For Halloween, you can make pumpkin cake pops, or you could make some of them look like candied apples, black cats, you could drape a thin sheet of white fondant over the top and make a ghost cake pop. There are tons of ways you could make spooky Halloween cake pops.
- Make Cake Pop Table Arrangements for Your Holiday Meals. Rather than spend additional money for table arrangements, use a few Lollipop / Treat Stands
as your centerpieces, and gear your cake pops to the holiday theme. For Easter, you could use chocolate cake and decorate your pops as Easter eggs, duckies or bunnies, for Thanksgiving you could make pumpkin spice cake pops and decorate them like acorns, fall apples, paint them with autumn leaves, and for Christmas, you could use chocolate mint cake, peppermint cake, or eggnog cake, and decorate the cake pops like Christmas Tree ornaments!
- Make a Cake Pop Croquembouche for Christmas. The traditional method for making a croquembouche (also croque en bouche) is to make cream puffs out of pate a choux batter, fill them with crème patisserie and assemble them into a Christmas tree shape using either using chocolate or caramel to secure the cream puffs in place. The result can be incredibly impressive and incredibly delicious, but it takes a lot of skill, a lot of time, and a lot of work.
You could make a smaller version with cake pops, perhaps using the Red Velvet Cake Pop Recipe included in the manual, perhaps using a pound cake recipe to emulate the rich butter and egg taste of cream puffs, or maybe even an adaptation of your favorite eggnog cake recipe. There are lots of different ways you could go in covering your cake pops, the traditional caramel or chocolate, or stir your melting chocolate with a candy cane to add a little peppermint flavor to your chocolate, or you could use Wilton Dark Green Candy Meltsto emulate green Christmas tree branches with White Candy Melts
to emulate snow on the branch tips. Take a floral foam cone and cover it with tin foil or some such food grade covering, then attach the cake pops, either using lollipop sticks or chocolate or caramel in the traditional fashion.
And your kids could make little snowmen with two cake pops, royal icing, and the candy decorations of your choice!
Cake Pop Cookbooks, Supplies and Accessories
I’ve included links to a number of cake pop books / cookbooks below, as well as some basic supplies. At a minimum, you’re probably going to want some lollipop sticks, melting chocolate (to hold the lollipop sticks securely in the cake pops) – or caramel should work if you don’t like chocolate – a couple of wire racks to cool the cake pops if you have them, and something to hold the cake pops while their coating dries. You could poke holes with a lollipop stick in any odd Styrofoam blocks you have, or if that isn’t available, you could use floral foam.
Bakerella Cake Pop Video Tutorial
This cake pop tutorial video was done by Angie Dudley, also known as Bakerella, the author of the first cake pop cookbook listed above. She uses the traditional cake pop method, with tons and tons of frosting mixed in with cake crumbs, but she does a really good demonstration of how to properly dip your cake pops into the melted candy coating (it would apply for chocolate or caramel as well) so that you don’t accidentally break them up, and how to gently remove the excess coating.
Babycakes Cake Pop Video Tutorial
This video tutorial was made by someone who purchased a Babycakes cake pop maker, not by a professional, so its a good guide to what the average user can expect to see in terms of results. And you can see exactly how it works. She also had the excellent idea of using a Pancake Pen
