- Hey, I'm John Kanell,
and today on "Preppy Kitchen,"
I'm showing you all the tips and tricks
to get perfect cake pops every time.
So let's get started.
First off, you'll need to whip up a batch of cake.
You could use my favorite vanilla cake recipe,
which is in the description box below,
or even cake,
cake box mix. (laughs) (Brian laughs)
What do they call it?
Boxed cake mix, right? - Yes.
- Yeah. (buzzer beeps)
Or even boxed cake mix, premade cake,
whatever will work.
This is so easy.
These guys are gonna cool.
Just finished baking.
And while they do that,
we're gonna mix up some amazing vanilla buttercream.
I do not want you to use the stuff
out of a container for this.
You're better than that.
All right, if you already have your buttercream on hand,
just skip ahead to the assembly.
Into the bowl of my mixer,
I'm adding 3/4 of a cup
of room-temperature, unsalted butter.
That's like 180 grams or so.
It'll be on the,
that little text thing below me to correct me
if I'm wrong. (laughs)
I'm also gonna be using a whisk attachment.
I wanna get this butter nice and fluffy.
So just start creaming it up.
And we're gonna mix this for a few minutes,
like three or four.
Have fun. We'll be right back.
(mixer whirring)
Once your buttercream is nice and fluffy,
we're gonna add about three cups of powdered sugar in.
It's really to taste,
so it's kind of up to you.
Mix on low, add a teaspoon of vanilla in,
a little pinch of salt is all you need.
Once it comes together,
a tablespoon of cream is a nice place to start
just to get this nice and silky smooth.
Our buttercream is complete and delicious.
(bright music)
(laughs) The cake is nice and cool.
We're ready to assemble our cake pops.
And this is gonna be so easy
if you follow a few key steps.
(whisk clangs)
Your cake pops should have
like really great consistency on the inside.
And that means that you do not want any little bits
of over caramelized or even burnt cake.
So we're gonna give these layers a very, very gentle trim.
You're also gonna find out
that if you just crumble the cake in here
and mix it with a buttercream, would it work?
Pretty much.
You'd have some issues,
which I'll talk about later.
But oh my gosh, they'll look dirty inside,
which is like disappointing
'cause you want a cake pop to have like that nice,
either a light color if it's vanilla,
if it's chocolate, it's a totally different story.
So I'm removing some of these caramelized sections.
And today I'm using two eight-inch cake rounds.
It's probably even easier
if you just made a big sheet cake
I'm also trimming the edge,
which is a little bit firmer,
and what would happen is it would not mix
in with the buttercream,
and you'd have not necessarily like a dry cake moment,
but it would just be weird.
Like you're like, "Hmm, what am I tasting right now?
Is this okay?"
Whereas you want someone to say, "Oh my gosh,
this is delicious throughout."
My cake's trimmed up.
We're ready to assemble.
So grab a big bowl.
You want a spatula, the frosting, the works.
And you're gonna begin by crumbling up the cake.
I wanna have little uniform pieces,
so just like in circular small motions you can break it up.
You don't wanna have a giant chunk of cake.
It just creates problems of having a spongy texture.
The deal with cake pops is you need them to be not firm,
but they can't yield too much.
Otherwise, it just won't work.
Things will crack,
they'll fall apart,
and you'll be disappointed.
You don't wanna be disappointed.
You wanna have a fun time in the kitchen.
All right, your cake is crumbled up.
Give it one final look through.
I swear, these big clumps of cake are a problem
because what happens is we start adding our frosting
and using a spatula,
you could use an electric mixture if you want,
but I don't wanna overmix this.
You should have a consistency similar to wet sand
but it shouldn't be like a paste.
You wanna have a little bit of the caky texture left.
So right now I'm using my spatula
and I'm tossing it around and smoothing it through.
So it's like I'm a cat pawing at the ball.
(tongue clicking) (cat meows)
If there's any places where it's dry,
like you see here,
those cake balls won't hold together,
and you are not gonna be happy, I promise.
Okay, so now you can see wet sand mixture.
Look how homogenous it looks.
All the same throughout.
I don't see any giant balls of cake hanging out.
There's no clumps of frosting.
And you can see it's still delicate.
So it's pulling apart.
There's cake in there.
This is ready to roll.
It's time to grab a baking sheet.
This is a special one,
but we're not baking
so it doesn't matter.
Little parchment paper to keep things nice and clean.
I want about one to one-and-a-half inch.
I like my little bit larger.
So I'm using a one-and-a-half-inch scoop.
You're gonna roll these,
and it's gonna be okay.
They will not look like perfect spheres,
but you can fix this later
because we're going to chill them.
For all my fellow Virgos out there,
and everybody else,
these guys are about 35 ounces, 35 grams. (laughs)
They're 35 grams. (indistinct)
- [Announcer] Mega cake pop.
- So right now they are so soft.
They've been through a lot.
These cake pops are gonna firm up when we chill them up.
And after they're chilled,
we can give them a final roll
to get them to be a little bit prettier and less lopsided.
If that bothers you.
These guys are looking great.
I'm loving that light, uniform color I got
from just shaving away the little bit of caramelization
on the outside.
I am, however, wanting to add some more color here.
So now, just gonna add a couple tablespoons of sprinkles.
Look how pretty this is. Come here.
Now we're just gonna mix that in
so they're uniformly distributed.
And just like that,
look how much better that is.
I kind of like the sprinkle situation even more.
So now when you bite into them,
you'll get a colorful little surprise.
Isn't that nice?
Do you know, on the channel,
we have how to make sprinkles?
And it's so fun.
My last cake ball is rolled.
These guys are gonna go into the fridge for four hours
or into the freezer for half an hour.
That's what I'm gonna do.
Towards the end of your chill time,
pull those cake pops out.
And you can see they look a little misshapen,
not quite right,
so what we're gonna do is give them a quick roll.
Now they feel so much firmer, which is great.
Once your cake balls are nice and round,
we can pop those back into the freezer
while we work on our coating,
which is a whole situation,
so I have to talk to you about it.
I'm using a double boiler,
and I'm gonna explain why.
I'm using chocolate melting wafers.
If you wanna use chocolate,
I am so proud of you.
Good job, they'll taste delicious,
but it's rather finicky
because if you've watched my hot chocolate bomb video,
you know tempering chocolate
is not the easiest thing in the world.
Chocolate melting wavers, however,
are not based with cocoa butter,
so you can melt them really easily in the microwave,
or so I've been told.
(wafers clang)
In truth, they're actually a little finicky themselves.
They tend to kind of just like not melt a lot of the time,
depending on the batch you get.
So I'm using a double boiler,
plopping them onto my simmering water,
I'll be stirring occasionally.
These guys are so much less likely to burn. It's amazing.
But I swear, in the microwave
what happens is your bowl gets so hot,
and then the candy melts are fairly cold on the inside,
and you're just left with a frustrating situation.
So my suggestion to you,
having learned the hard way many times,
is to just melt these in a double boiler
and it should be easier.
We'll find out.
Candy melts also have the advantage of being really white.
If you compare them to white chocolate,
the white chocolate is actually a light yellow color,
which people don't realize
until they see it on their cake pop
and they start asking questions.
So my candy melt is melted. Hi.
But as you can see,
this doesn't look very dippable, does it?
It's fairly thick,
which happens a lot of the time. (laughs)
So I'm gonna add a teaspoon or so
of shortening right in there.
You could use coconut oil as well,
as long as it's not the fractionated kind.
It needs to be a solid at room temperature.
And you're gonna mix that in really well.
You'll see an immediate change in the texture
'cause it needs to be able to be dippable,
but you need to mix it in well
because if there's a streak of coconut oil,
that will not set up
and it'll be a cracking point.
See how it's falling off of my spatula now?
That means we're ready to dip.
(gasps) Let's get to dippin'.
A couple things are gonna happen together at the same time.
It's gonna be amazing.
One, I grabbed a batch
of my cold balls of cake out of the freezer.
We're working in batches
because when things get warm, you get sad. (laughs)
Now, I'm gonna take my little treat sticks,
as they're called, dip the end in chocolate.
And then, actually, I'm gonna make a little hole,
and then dip that in chocolate, like this.
And this will be the glue
that kind of helps hold it in.
The sticks shouldn't go too far in
because you don't want them coming out the other side.
But you need to have a good base to hold on
for our crucial dipping step.
Are we ready to dip?
No, we are not ready to dip.
That would be bad because,
one, it's a bit awkward to dip into the bowl,
so I will be transferring my chocolate melting wafers
that I've melted into a cup.
Also, there is some science here,
because these guys are cold now,
this is fairly warm,
what'll happen is if these are too cold,
and you dip them in,
this hot candy melt will harden over this cold ball.
But as that hot stuff cools down,
it contracts because of kinetic energy,
and you have cracking forming.
You could also have some extrusion,
which we'll talk about later. (laughs)
Anyways, let's dip this up and see how it goes.
But where will we put this?
Where will it go?
I actually bought little stands for my cake balls.
These cake stands are a good bet.
If you have the desire to make a cake pop,
have a place to put it.
Here we go.
(upbeat music)
Dip, dip, dip.
Work that around.
Spin a little bit.
And you only have a few seconds of time
in the candy melt
before it starts to cool down
and you're not happy anymore.
You're gonna tap the excess off.
Here, any like drippy bits,
use your spoon or spatula to remove.
And there you go.
I will warn you.
Let's be real with each other.
They will have a pretty side and a less pretty side.
All of it's delicious,
but that's the way it goes.
A few sprinkles.
And it's just like that.
These sprinkles look great,
but I happen to have some lavender candy melt,
so I'm gonna melt that and swipe it over the top
so you can see a different look too.
So easy. (bright music)
(teeth crunching) Mmm.
Melt in your mouth,
so soft and amazing on the inside
with that satisfying crunch on the outside,
and cute as a boot.
I hope you get a chance to make this recipe.
And if you liked this video,
check out my Easy Treat playlist.