Yesterdish’s Cake Pops

It’s Dori again, and I’m so thrilled that Adam asked me to do this special Yesterdish birthday project.

Happy birthday Yesterdish!

In the 12 short months that Yesterdish has existed, 1346 recipes have been saved from brink of extinction.

Also in that time, Adam has become something of an expert on this history of American food. He’s the one that does the real work of Yesterdish: the research. It takes hours to develop the stories that accompany many of the recipes. Most bloggers do a quick Google search and copy and paste whatever turns up first. Not Adam – he works to verify every story he tells. He uses old newspaper clippings, deciphers scribbled notes, and cross checks everything.

Linus and Sally are made from-cake-and frosting dough, and are dipped in colored white chocolate. You can’t tell from the picture, but they are on sticks.

Time and time again he discovers misinformation that traveled like a virus through the food blogs of the internet. [Like Hummingbird Cake, for example. — Adam] You may not be able to trust everything you read on the internet, but it’s nice to know that you can trust everything you read on Yesterdish.

[I’m sure I make mistakes, but it’s not for lack of trying! — Adam]

I’m so proud of Yesterdish and Adam (who, I feel like I should mention, is a pretty decent brother too) that when he asked me to make a cake pop display based on the classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown I knew it had to be really special.

So why a cake pop display?

Because I have a dessert business and I love making interesting cake pops. It’s called kat&dori. Maybe you’ve heard of us? We’re very lucky to have fun creative customers that request custom orders. We’ve done minions, pirates (rum-flavored, of course), teddy bears, panda bears, flowers, hamsters, and we’re getting more fun orders every day.

As we’ve seen with so many other recipes, there’s a lot of cake pop misinformation out there! Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with: cake pops are made from cake that is crumbled up and mixed with frosting to form a dough. The dough is then rolled into balls and dipped in some kind of coating. Sprinkles or other edible adornments may follow.

You do not need any kind of waffle-iron looking contraption or weirdo pan or whatever to make them. Tiny balls of dry cake are not my thing. Those will never look or taste as good as the cake crumb kind.

Linus and Sally are made from-cake-and frosting dough, and are dipped in colored white chocolate. You can’t tell from the picture, but they are on sticks. Most cake pops are more like the ones in the instructional pictures — I just wanted to step things up for a special day!

The entire display took about 12 hours to complete — and I absolutely could not have done it without help from my mother and grandmother. I was visiting them this week and I’m so happy I had their help!

Even if you don’t want to spend 12 hours, and you don’t have a staff of two assistants that are legally required to love you even when you yell at them for sloppy cake pop dipping, you can still make wonderful cake pops!

There are about a million cake pops tutorials out there, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, I’m just going to share some of my tips for great cake pops. I suggest you start by watching a few tutorials on youtube and then come here. Then make cake pops!

Cake: The first few times you make cake pops, please use a boxed cake and canned frosting. (Note: this is the only time it’s acceptable to use canned frosting.) Why? some from scratch cakes and frostings are better for cake pops than others, boxed mixes work well. If things don’t work, you’ll know it’s your technique and you can fix it before you ruin your beautiful from-scratch cake.

Dough: I know that most tutorials advise you to keep your cake pops in the fridge and only take a few out at a time to dip, but those tutorials are stupid. Your dough mixture should be fine at room temperature. If you have to keep sticking it in the fridge to get the balls to hold together, you’ve added too much frosting. When you roll dough, it should hold together easily, be smooth, and have no cracks.

Coating: Don’t think you can just melt chocolate chips to coat these — chocolate is kind of a jerk, and white chocolate is an even bigger jerk. Spring for candy melts. Wilton is easy to find but hard to work with (add oil and not water to thin it), but Mercken’s come in better colors and are easier to work with.

Coating technique: Do not twirl the cake pop in the coating. (People seem to really want to do that, I don’t know why. ) Instead, tilt the container so the coating pools on one side, push the cake pop into the chocolate, pull it out slightly, turn, repeat. Make sure you cover every bit of the cake pop, no holes!

Sprinkles: Drop sprinkles onto the cake pop while the candy melt is still wet. Don’t push the cake pop into the sprinkles — you waste sprinkles and risk cracking your cake pop.

And there you have it! Go ahead and give it a shot!