Jack-O-Lantern Cake Pops

In the spirit of Halloween and our trip to the pumpkin patch I decided to make Jack-O-Lantern cake pops.  I have made cake pops one other time and they came out pretty good (no pictures of them - darn!) so I thought these would be a breeze.  And they aren't that hard, but there are a lot of steps and in-between the steps you need to chill the cake pops so it can be time consuming.
I made my cake, let it cool and crumbled it into pieces with my hands.  I looked at Bakerella's blog for inspiration.  I don't want mine to be too gooey so for one cake I used 1/2 cup of frosting which is Wilton's recipe.  I mixed the frosting in with my hands and rolled them into cake pops.  It is like rolling meatballs!  The neat thing is that you really can do any shape, think - ghosts or train - whatever!  After you roll them they must go into the fridge for a couple of hours.  When you take them out you are ready to insert the lollipop stick.  Dip your lollipop stick into melted candy - color of your choice, I used orange- and insert stick half way into cake pop.  Make sure you  use the same color for the stick as you are going to use for the pop.  Then back in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes until the candy has set.

Next dip the cake pop into your melted candy.  Here is where I had trouble!  You can melt your candy in the microwave according to the package directions or using a double boiler.  I chose microwave - anything to save time!!  My problem - I burnt my candy first time around.  I kept thinking it wasn't melting and would put it in again.  When you overheat the candy it gets really thick.  YUCK!  I had to throw it out and start over.  The trick is to really, really stir the candy between each microwave trip.  I got the candy right and dipped my pops.  Once you dip you can gently tap the pop against the side of the bowl to remove excess candy.  Then back in the fridge!

Now that my pops are covered in orange candy and chilled I can decorate.  I used green icing to add the pumpkin stem and black food coloring to draw the faces on.  Let me tell you - the food coloring is really hard to use as paint!!  I wanted to use an edible pen but only needed black and didn't want to buy the five pack of pens so figured I could just use food coloring - Wrong!!  The pen would have been much better and that is what I will use next time.

So lessons learned from Jack-O-Lantern cake pops - 1.  Don't overheat your candy melts!!  2.  Buy the right tools, in this case the edible pens!

Cake pops definately catch my interest.  They are so versatile.  I am sure you will see them again.  And the most important thing??  Very tasty!!