Cake pops are delicious little round cake balls on lollipop sticks, often dipped in chocolate before being iced and decorated. They’re the cutest thing since the cupcake and can be made in a range of flavours and iced to any colour or decoration you wish. If you’re a keen cake baker and you fancy a new challenge for your wedding, here’s how to make your own cake pops, decorate and present them. Your wedding guests are in for a real treat!
Design your own cake pops
Whether you go for vanilla sponge, chocolate truffle or even a very special liqueur laced cake, once you have decided on the recipe you will be using, you need to design your cake pops before you can go out and buy all your ingredients and decorations.
The simplest designs use one colour for the cake pop and another colour for the ribbon around the stick. If your wedding colours are red and ivory then you could choose to simply dip your cake pops into white chocolate and tie with a red satin bow.
For a more adventurous design decorate the cake pop with different contrasting or complementary colours to coordinate with your colour scheme and add detail to correspond with your theme. For instance if your wedding theme is lilac and purple with a silver accent and a butterfly theme, then you could dip your cake pops in lilac coloured frosting, decorate with a rich purple icing and add silver glitter sparkles and a rice-paper butterfly before tying with ivory or purple chiffon ribbon.
Make your cake pops into little people and have the whole bridal party dressed in tiny clothes made of icing for a real wow-factor! To do this, put two cake balls onto a stick – the top ball being the head and the lower ball, the body. Decorate with smiling faces, winking eyes, wedding attire, pearls for the bride and a buttonhole rose for the groom, to create the most perfect wedding cake pops!
Image courtesy of Polka Pops
Here’s how to make cake pops
To make your own cake pops you will need a cake pop pan, cake pop sticks, a recipe, ingredients and any decorative accessories such as cellophane to wrap each cake pop individually, ribbons to tie around each stick, edible rice paper butterflies, chocolate sprinkles or edible glitter. John Lewis not only sells the cake pop pan (though you can also buy other variations of the cake pop pan or mould elsewhere for less) and sticks, they also have this great cake pop recipe on their website:
Ingredients:
- 2 eggs
- 110g butter
- 110g caster sugar
- 110g self raising flour
- 300g white and 300g milk chocolate
- Additional decorations as required for your design
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 170°C
In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, along with a little flour to stop the mixture from curdling.
Once combined, sift in the rest of the flour and fold into the mixture. Grease the cake pop pan well and add the mixture to the bottom half of the tin (the part with no holes) until each mould is full.
Attach the top half of the tin. Place on a baking tray and bake for about 15 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool slightly, then remove the pops from the pan to finish cooling.
Meanwhile, melt the white and milk chocolate separately, either in in a microwave in short bursts on full power, or in a bain Marie (a bowl over simmering water – make sure the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl).
Dip a lolly stick into melted chocolate, insert into the cake pops and allow to cool, this will ensure the stick stays secure. Dip the cake pops into the melted chocolate, spinning to let any excess drip off.
Decorating your cake pops
Allow to set by placing upside down on greaseproof paper with the sticks in the air or by sticking them into large baking potatos (cut the base flat if you need to make it steady) with holes pre-made by a barbecue skewer.
Easy ways to decorate: sprinkles, edible pearls or gems, drizzle of chocolate in a different colour than the base, chopped up maraschino cherries, chocolate flakes, cocoa powder, coconut, Smarties or Skittles – the sky is the limit!
Storing your cake pops before the big day is simple as cake pops will keep in the fridge for around a week.
Presenting your cake pops
There are different ways of presenting your cake pops depending on how you intend to use them at your wedding. As an additional or alternative option to a slice of wedding cake, present a number of cake pops with their sticks pushed firmly into a decorative base such as a coloured half-globe stand or you could even have them decorating the main wedding cake.
Cake pop favours
As a special gift to each guest, left at their table setting, cake pops make ideal wedding favours and can be wrapped so guests can easily take them home. You could even add each guest’s name to them and use them as place cards. Add a coloured ribbon and a personal message to make them extra special.
There’s a reason why these are such a huge hit at weddings – if you make them you’re guaranteed to delight everyone, plus you get to brag you did it all yourself! Happy baking!
Find more great ideas on our Inspiration wedding cake pages!
