St. Patrick's Day Cake Pops

So I thought I would make something sweet and festive for St. Patrick's Day this year. Thanks to a friend, I was forwarded a blog post about green cake pops. It all starts with Green Velvet cake, yes green. Tastes the same as red velvet, just a different color.

Green Velvet Cake

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1 Tablespoon cocoa

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 eggs

1 cup oil

1 cup buttermilk

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 oz green food coloring

Combine wet ingredients in a mixer and blend.  Combine all your dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Next, gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet. Once blended, put the mixture in cake or cupcake pans.  I baked two 8 inch cakes at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes. Cupcakes will probably take 22-25 minutes.

After the cakes have baked and cooled, you grind them up in a food processor. You're looking to create a crumb like mixture. Once you have that done, you gradually add frosting to the crumbs and pulse in the food processor.  You can use canned frosting, I just always make my own.  You're looking for the crumbs to form more of a dough; a mixture that can easily be molded in your hands to make balls.

Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8oz block of cream cheese (room temperature)

1 stick of butter (softened)

1 cup of powdered sugar

1 teaspoon of vanilla

Once you have the mixture ready, you form the cake crumbs into small balls. Try to shoot for the size of a ping pong ball. I made mine a little bigger than that and it caused a bit of a problem.

Now you are ready to add your lollipop sticks. It is best to dip the sticks in your melted chocolate first. It acts as a glue and helps hold the stick in place. As for the chocolate, I just used the white chocolate melts you can buy in craft stores and followed the instructions on the back. 

Once you have all the sticks in place and have given them some time to dry, you're ready to coat them in chocolate. This process can be a pain. The chocolate melts tend to melt to a thick consistency, so you can't just dip them in and pull them out. I had to use a spoon and coat each cake ball. Then while they were still wet, I sprinkled them with green sugar and placed them on wax paper to harden. You can also use a strainer to hold your cake pops while they dry (so they don't have a flat bottom). Just check to make sure the lollipop sticks fit in the holes before you stick a finish cake pop in there.

Once they are dry, you just peel them off the wax paper and can package them for gifts, bake sales, etc.