Chocolate Covered Cake Pops

Yellow cake mixed with cream cheese frosting covered in milk chocolate. Every bite is filled with delicious cake, frosting, and chocolate. These are perfect as a gift or a quick snack. 

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This recipe was supposed to be a pre-Valentine’s Day post, but this last week has been hectic with family visiting so I’ve been a little behind. This is great for a last minute Valentine’s Day gift, but if not, there are plenty of other occasions for you to make cake pops. For instance, they’re perfect as birthday gifts too. Instead of a birthday cake, maybe you can make birthday cake pops. One cake pop for every year of age! Or… maybe not. Because that could end up being a lot of cake pops. They’re pretty easy to make, and they’re so addictive! I’ve been playing with this recipe a few times in the last three weeks before I found the perfect combination. And I think I’ve had way too many cake pops and cake truffles these past several days. I’ll have to lay off the sugar for awhile…

For this cake pop recipe, I used half a box of yellow cake mix. I’ll be honest. I’m not good at making cake from scratch. It just doesn’t have the right texture. They turn out more muffin-like than cake-like. So I’m still working on that aspect of baking. But this way definitely works too, and it’s simple. I love the taste of yellow cake, but I think it’s too sweet. So in this recipe, I decided I’ll use half of the cake mix and add in ¼ cup flour to try to make the cake less overwhelmingly sweet.

Add in a beaten egg, ¼ cup vegetable oil, and ½ cup water.

Mix all the ingredients together so that it becomes a yellow batter.

I lined a bread loaf pan with foil and poured the batter into it.

Preheat the oven to 350^oF. Bake the cake in the oven at 350^oF for 24-29 minutes. That’s what’s recommended on the cake mix box. But I often find that the temperature of my oven varies from other people’s. I check to see if my cake is ready by inserting a toothpick into the center of the cake. If the toothpick comes out relatively clean, my cake is finished baking. I even ate a piece to make sure that the cake was ready. You can see that even with a cake mix, I can’t make cake very well. It sinks down in the middle. Probably because I added extra flour, but it doesn’t really matter, not for this recipe.

Remove the cake from the foil and into a large bowl.

Use a fork to break the cake into crumbs. Set it aside for now.

In a small bowl, place 4 tablespoons of cream cheese. I used a 1/3 less fat. This will be used to make the cream cheese frosting. In my first attempt at making cake pops, I used cream cheese frosting from Betty Crocker, but I felt that it made the cake pops too sweet so I decided to make my own. If you prefer to use the premade frosting, I recommend using 4 tablespoons. This amount is perfect for moistening the cake crumbs and allows you to roll the cake into balls.

I added 3 teaspoons of powdered sugar. I thought this was the perfect amount of sweetness for me. But make this according to your taste. Slowly add the sugar and taste the frosting as you do to see how you like it. You might like more or less sugar than me. =) Mix the cream cheese and the powdered sugar until it has a whipped creamy texture.

Mix the cream cheese frosting with the cake crumbs. I find it easier to use my hands to do this. If you’re worried about getting cake under your nails, you can wear a disposable glove while doing this. As you’re mixing the cream cheese frosting with the cake, the crumbs will start to stick together as you can see in the photo below.

Roll the cake and cream cheese frosting into balls about an inch or slightly smaller. When you coat the cake balls with chocolate, it will become larger.

Lightly cover the cake balls with plastic wrap and place them in the freezer for about half an hour. This will help make the cake balls firmer so that it will be easier to dip in chocolate.

When the cake balls are firm, remove them from the freezer. Measure out about a cup of chocolate chip morsels and melt them in a cup in the microwave according to the directions on the package. My chocolate chip morsels needed to be heated in the microwave for 60 seconds and then stirred with a spoon until all the chocolate chips melted. I melted the chocolate chips in a short cup because I felt that a bowl would have too wide of a bottom. It would be difficult to dip with the chocolate spreading outwards. Instead, I chose to use a cup so that I would have more depth to dip my cake balls. You’ll need two cups of chocolate chips, but I decided to do them one cup at a time so that the chocolate stays melted. As for the chocolate, I chose to use milk chocolate. If you prefer dark chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, or white chocolate, use those instead.

Insert a lollipop stick into the cake balls and then dip them into the melted chocolate. You can use a spoon to pour chocolate over the bottom of the cake where it is attached to the stick if the chocolate doesn’t cover that area.

Scrap off any excess chocolate from the cake pop with a spoon or a fork. If you there is excess chocolate, it will start to drip downwards and your cake pop will end up looking a bit lopsided. Which is fine too. I’ve made plenty of mistakes and I covered them up by decorating. I added sprinkles onto some, toffee bits onto others, and dripped melted chocolate onto the outside to make swirls. The chocolate does dry relatively quickly, but in order for it to harden, it’s best to place the cake pops into a container and into the fridge for about 10-15 minutes.

I had my sisters do some of the decorating.

This recipe yields about 28-32 cake pops depending on how big you roll the cake balls. But we ended up eating some as we were making these. They’re so addictive. We couldn’t help eating them as we were making them.

Enjoy!

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