cake pops

There is a thin layer of brown dust on my kitchen. The stove, the counter, the handles of the fridge. This is what happens when I play with cocoa powder.

Last week I baked a cake for my sister's birthday, a Devil's Food cake with a dark chocolate whipped cream frosting. It seems excessive but I had to use a $300 sashimi knife from Osaka to cut cake layers because I don't own a bread knife or a similarly serrated knife of the appropriate length for the task. In producing even layers for the cake, the crumbs I sliced off were kept in a take-out container for tonight's experiment: cake pops.

Cake Pops have somehow become a cottage industry for bloggers who like sweets. There's a company in Irvine that makes them in an actual bakery and packages them for you as gifts. A friend brought some to a party I went to and I was hooked. Basically, you have cake bits mixed with adhesive (frosting works) dipped in chocolate and stuck on a lollipop stick.

I had cake crumbs but no lollipop sticks so I just decided to make them into little cake truffles. I mixed the crumbs with a mixture of cream cheese, unsalted butter, confectioner's sugar and cocoa powder. I cooled the mixture, formed them into balls and then dipped them into chocolate melted in a glass bowl on top of a pot of boiling water. In the future, I'll freeze the balls before dipping them in COOLED melted chocolate. The temperatures were too high all around and my first attempt became a soggy mound of shiny, runny chocolate on top of a slowly oozing cake falling through the grate of a cake rack.

When I gave everything a chance to cool, I resumed and produced some lovely looking truffles dusted, like the kitchen, in cocoa powder. I ate a tester and between the few that I ate to ensure the right flavor, I feel sick and jittery. This coupled with the brown smears across my chef's coat make me look like someone you'd stay away from. But I bet you can't...because I've got all the cake pops.