If you read my previous post about Advent Calendars, you know I wanted to attempt making a different edible advent calendar this year. When I was researching for edible ones I was pretty surprised to discover that nobody (at least after hours of search I could not find one!) made an Advent Calendar using the treat trend of the moment : cake pops.
I definitely undervaluated the effort to do it and although it took me only one evening (hubby gave me a massive help by cutting out the cardboard Christams tree) it will be a while after I will make cake pops again..
Oh noo, wait! Damn! I forgot.. I need to make a few for my sister’s birthday dessert table next Saturday! Oh well…
Anyway.. I thought this was an original idea and wish I had more time to make both the cake pops decorations and the numbers perfect. Unfortunately I only have evenings to work on my projects, so after my children are asleep and kitchen is clean, I start all over again (what’s wrong with me!?!? )
This time to make the cakepops I use a cake pop maker instead of crumbling a cake and then adding buttercream. I preferred it this way as the cake pop texture was lighter. At the same time, I needed to be more careful in making them as there usually is a higher chance for the sticks to slip out (even if you inserted them adding some melted chocolate as glue).
To cover the cake pops I used coloured candy coating which I thought was easier to melt than a normal bar of baking chocolate. Could not be more wrong! Every time I was melting the candy it went back hard in few minutes so I had to put it again and again in the microwave. Seriously… at the end I checked online and discovered that even good brands of candy coating are actually pretty rubbish therefore in some cases you’d need to add a little vegetable fat, which I did and it helped a bit.
To make the cake pop mix I just used a simple recipe which called for:
100 gr of unsalted butter
100gr of sugar
100gr of self raising flower
2tbsp of vanilla extract
2 eggs
After I dipped my cake pops in chocolate, I covered them with white granulated sugar and red granulated sugar (the latter made by myself) and let them dry on a cake pop stand.
The last stage of the process was making the little numbers. Oh dear.. NOT EASY! They kept breaking and the fondant was getting stuck on the letter cutter…that’s why they look a bit scruffy!
While I was preparing all edible parts of the calendar, my hubby drew a Christmas tree on a hard green cardboard and cut it to shape. He then drew the circles and made the holes to insert the cake pops.
Because the letters needed to dry out, I glued them to the cake pops the next day using royal icing. Because they were so thin I broke a few so had to make them all over again..
If I had more time, I would have put more attention to detail in doing it but recently I’m getting addicted to Pinterest where I find many creative Christmas projects and I’d like to make them all!
The final result was not perfect but I’m pretty pleased with it and the fact that I think this is the only cake pop Advent calendar on the planet, makes me really proud!
After all this effort if you find another one online please just don’t mention it to me 🙂
