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How to Display your Cake Pops – Decorating Ideas
Red Velvet Cake Ball
Cake Pops
This is a bit of a personal tale about decorating your cake pops and how to display them for your special occasion, you can find the recipe for the basic cake pop at
Cake pop recipes for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Weddings and Birthdays.
We decided to make these after reading a magazine and thinking they looked really nice, but we didn't realise just how good they would turn out. I will talk about the problems and difficulties associated with working with chocolate, but trust me when I say it is worth it.
You have shaped your red velvet cakes into balls and now you are looking for ideas on how to decorate and display them. Well in the States you have a very useful thing called candy melts which will make the colours much easier. In the UK, these can be hard or expensive to come by, but don't worry, there are plenty of alternatives.
Melted Chocolate
Blue White Chocolate
Why make more than you require
Decorating Ideas
For ours we used white and milk chocolate, however dark chocolate would be good too. We used 300g of each which was still too much, so less would be fine, but if you are looking for more colours, increase the amount of white chocolate.
Melt down the chocolate in a bowl over a simmering pan of water. Do not let it boil heavily or the water touch the bottom of the bowl as this will burn the chocolate and affect the flavour. Also as a personal note, don't forget to remember the balls need 3 hours to cool in the fridge, so don't put the chocolate on until it's nearly time to come out of the fridge.
To create your colours of choice you can separate the white chocolate and add the colourings to it, these colourings need to be pastes or gels as liquids will react with the chocolate and make it unusable. The easiest colours to get are yellow, blue and red however you can make some other colours by mixing them in the following quantities:
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Dark Orange: 1 part red to 1 part yellow
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Light orange: 3 parts red to 4 parts yellow
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Purple: 25 parts red to 1 part blue
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Green: 1 part blue to 5 parts yellow
Now a note of caution will be mentioned here... chocolate can be frustrating to work with, it's not overly difficult but you have to work fast and accurately and not worry about getting drops of coloured chocolate all over your kitchen.
So moving on from that, you have your desired coating ready, now dip your stick into the mixture. We struggled to find lollipop sticks, so we used the stirring sticks which can be found at any coffee shop. Push the stick about halfway through the cake ball, don't push too far as they the stick will poke out the top and ruin that ball, due to this and the nature of the chocolate, I’d suggest making 20% more balls than you require.
Roll the balls in the chocolate and use a spoon to completely cover the cake pop and rotate and allow the excess to drip off. Before it is completely dry, you need to add the decorations so that they stick to the chocolate. Just some ideas for decorations - a yellow coloured chocolate looks great with flours and butterflies for a summer wedding or birthday. The white chocolate coating with white glitter, stars, and snow flakes make great winter wonderland style cake pops, pink icing with names would make a great girly birthday display. Or go for a mixture as we did for an eclectic and vibrant display.
How they look on Styrofoam Display
How to Display your Cake Pops
Displaying your cake pops is the most exciting part, making your beautiful and tasty cake pops look stunning is an art in itself. The most important word I can say to you is Styrofoam, You can buy this from any good store which sell dry flower displays. You can carve this into any shape you want, you could use a small amount and a single classy looking pop with the persons name as a wedding favour, you could spell out the birthday girl or boys name in the Styrofoam and then place them into the foam.
Push the sticks into the display, keeping them as vertical as possible and just do what you like and you can't go wrong. Have fun and enjoy yourself with this fun, exciting and unusual take on a classic cake.
Further Reading
- bakerella.com
The Queen of the Cake Pops - you have to check out some her unique and incredible cake pop designs.