bakerella's cupcake pops

It's a little after the fact now... but I still thought I'd share with you the photos of Bakerella's cupcake pops that I made for the Fourth of July. I modeled mine after her Patriotic Pops and brought them to a family gathering with my in-laws.

Dipping the cake balls into the chocolate without making a complete mess proved to be a little more difficult than you'd imagine. At first, they were looking a bit wonky, like this:

My lovely assistant/husband who was helping me at this point came up with the idea to use a skewer for dipping, then removing the skewer to let the chocolate cool and harden (bottom right photo on second collage image, above). This made everything go much more smoothly, as you can see below. Once he would take the pop off of the skewer and sit it upside-down to let it cool, I would stick in the lollipop sticks while the chocolate was still warm.

When it came time for Nick to dip the pops into white chocolate for the cupcake tops, he just grabbed the lollipop sticks and dipped. (Please ignore our messy kitchen in the below photo... I never claimed to be a mess-free cook!)

We did not have a styrofoam block to put the lollipop sticks into for the white chocolate to cool with the pops sitting upright, so we ended up taking the sticks out and just letting them cool on wax paper. So technically, they became cupcake bites instead of cupcake pops, but having the lollipop sticks in them for dipping still made it much, much easier.

As soon as they were sitting on the wax paper, I decorated them with red or blue sugar crystals and red or blue M&Ms while the white chocolate was still warm. (Unless you're making hundreds of bites/pops, don't bother buying the monochromatic M&Ms. They're ridiculously overpriced — we just bought a regular bag of M&Ms and picked out the red and blue ones! There were plenty to go around and plenty left over afterwards. Om nom nom.)

Note to self for next year: the red sugar crystals on white chocolate topped with an M&M kind of makes the cupcake bites look like eyeballs. Stick with the blue sugar crystals! Much cuter.

They certainly weren't perfect, but I was excited that I tried something new. And despite looking a little imperfect, they were SO yummy!!!

I'm so busy these days that usually, if we bring something to a gathering of friends or family, Nick ends up making it. I was starting to feel crappy about never having a part in putting together some yummy treats, so I wanted this to be my project (although he graciously helped me towards the end when we were under a time crunch). Any cooking project that involves such a crafty aspect is appealing to me because I feel like I get to be artistic.