Some kitchen equipment is wonderful, some is entirely useless to me.
Useful:
- A good knife!
- Food processor
- Apple slicers (if your laziness is keeping your from preparing a smoothie)
- muffin baking tins!
- a bains-marie
Useless:
- Cake pop baking tins.
Seriously. Nobody needs those cake pop baking tins. I don't own one and that's not going to change. Friends of mine have tried them, only to complain about oddly shaped, not so great tasting, rather dry cake pops. Here is why you don't need one: You have hands (if not, I apologize for making this assumption). Making cake pops requires any cake tin that you already have, a good cake recipe, some other ingredients and hands that don't mind getting knuckle-deep in cake and jam.
Ingredients for my Chocolate Raspberry Cake Pops:
Please not that you can really bake any cake as the cake basis for this. If you really love lemon cake pops, make a lemon cake!
- 200g of buckwheat flour (if you don't care about the gluten-free part, you can use any flour)
- 50g of cocoa powder
- 200g of sugar (I used unrefined raw cane sugar)
- 1 teaspoon of baking soda
- 240ml of water
- real vanilla or some vanilla flavor (I used vanillin sugar)
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt
- 80ml of oil (sunflower, canola... just make sure it doesn't taste too strong)
- 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
In order to turn the cake into cake pops, you'll also need:
- Dark chocolate (or vegan milk/white chocolate)
- a jar of jam or your choice (I used raspberry)
Yes, you can also use homemade jam. I just didn't have any right now, so I opted for an organic brand we like.
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 180°C/350°F.
- Let's bake that cake! Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, salt, sugar, baking soda, vanillin sugar) in a bigger bowl, and all the wet ingredients (water, vinegar, oil) in another bowl.
- Grease up a baking pan of your choice. I figured Darth Vader and chocolate cake go well together.
- Mix the dry ingredients well. Sift the cocoa if it's lumpy.
- Pour all of the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix well.
- Fill into the cake tin.
- Bake cake at 180°C/350°F for about 30 minutes.
- Take the cake out of the oven. Allow to cool down.
So this cake is already pretty awesome and tasty all by itself. If you got too hungry while making this, this is the time for you to eat that cake! If you have enough self-control to keep going, stay tuned for the cake pop making!
- Sorry Darth, this is it. Put the cake in a bowl and crumble it apart.
- Add jam of your choice. I used 340g of raspberry jam.
- Mix well, squish everything together! :)
- Roll little balls about the size of a big walnut.
- Prepare some stuff:
- Melt your chocolate in a bain marie.
- Since those lollipop sticks are ridiculously expensive, I bought a pack of those little wooden sticks you use to stir your take out coffee. I cut them in half.
- Prepare some sprinkles/decoration for your cake pops. Watch out! A lot of things are covered in shellac ("a resin secreted by the female lac bug"), often abbreviated as E904, to make them look extra shiny.
- Dip a stick in molten chocolate and stick it into a cake pop. This is important, so don't leave out this step. The chocolate on the stick inside the cake pop helps the stick hold onto the cake pop.
- Once the chocolate is dry and cold, you can pick up the cake pop. Make sure the chocolate is actually solid, so the stick does not slip out of the cake pop.
- Carefully dip the cake pop into the molten chocolate. Allow excess chocolate to drip back into the bain-marie before dipping the cake pop into the sprinkles.
- Place cake pop onto a tray and allow the chocolate to dry.
- Serve, enjoy, and share with other people! <3
