Our very first blog post overviews the cake pop making process with some tips & tricks: check it out if you’re new to cake pop making! In this post, L will talk about some twists to make your cake pops extra special including:

• Making the perfect oreo cake pop (I’ve made these at least 20 times: the objective fan favorite!)
• Adding color to the inside: our fave is a full rainbow!
• Playing with silicone molds to make shaped pops
• Keeping your pops off the stick for certain designs: evidenced by our beachy batch & monster pops!

The Perfect Oreo Cake Pop

The Oreo/cookies and cream cake pop is always a crowd-pleaser, and as someone not very savvy with decorating, the crushed oreos look *chef’s kiss* every time! I recommend using yellow cake and vanilla frosting but have also used white cake, chocolate cake, cream cheese frosting, and chocolate frosting in different trials and every combo is tasty.

Changes from your usual cake pop: 

You will follow the usual process of making cake pops (which we outline here!) with yellow cake and add oreos 3 separate times. The only additional ingredient you need is a family-sized package of oreos: as much as you may be tempted to get Double Stuf, I recommend sticking to the classic as the extra filling in Double Stuf will make your pops too moist.

1. Add 12 crushed oreos (completely ground into crumbs with no large pieces) to the cake mix itself before putting it in the oven. I use a small food processor, but you can also put the oreos in a large Ziploc bag and use a rolling pin or something heavy to crush them up.
2. When you crumble the baked cake and add frosting, add 12 more crushed oreos (also completely ground into crumbs with no large pieces) to the mixture.
3. Finally, when you are ready to decorate, crush oreos (leave some larger pieces this round) and sprinkle them on the chocolate-dipped cake pop.

Multicolored Pops: Rainbow!

These rainbow pops are a labor of love: I’ve made them a couple times and they are not for the faint of heart. I’ve also made a few batches with just 2 or 3 colors (either striped or marbled) following these same instructions and they are much easier, but let’s be real: can anything beat the way these look?! Keep each of your colors separate until the final step or you will create a nice muddy brown (so you might as well have saved yourself the effort and made naturally brown – chocolate – pops!)

Changes from your usual cake pop: 

1. You can use vanilla or yellow cake mix to make colorful pops. Vanilla takes best to food coloring but both work!
2. Rather than putting your prepared cake mix into a cake pan, separate equal amounts depending on how many colors you want to use (you can weigh or eyeball it) into separate bowls and add your desired food coloring to each bowl. The color tends to dull a tiny bit once baked so I recommend being generous with the food coloring if you’d like vibrant colors.
3. Use a cupcake/muffin tin to keep each color separate while baking. If you do a full ROYGBIV rainbow (with 6 total colors because unless you are a rainbow purist, indigo/violet is basically 2 shades of purple), you will likely have 3-4 cupcakes in each color so may need to do multiple rounds if using one tin.
4. After the cakes bake, keep the colors separate when crumbling the cake and adding icing. 
5. Layer a small amount of each color to make a multicolored ball. You can use your cookie scoop to estimate the amount of each color you need to make your usual-sized ball. It’s not an exact science: each one will be a little different!
6. Complete the rest of your usual cake pop process: refrigerate them to harden a bit, melt chocolate to adhere the cake pop sticks to the cake balls, refrigerate again, then cover with melted chocolate and any sprinkles/decoration you’d like. Ta da: you have perfect rainbow pops!

Playing with Silicone Molds

We happened to have a heart silicone mold laying around, and it made for the perfect Valentine’s Day pops. If you have any molds laying around, give these shaped cake pops a try! The heart is a perfectly simple design to make these successful. The shape should be a similar size to your cookie scoop/the usual amount you would use for a cake pop so the cake balls are not too heavy and fall off the stick. I would caution against using a mold with intricate designs that will lose definition when you cover them with chocolate. If you’ve got tons of tools at your disposal, anything is possible, but if you are someone who bakes purely for fun (and wants to enjoy the process), I recommend keeping it simple!

The ONLY change from making your usual cake pop is:

Rather than forming the cake/frosting mixture into a ball using your cookie scoop, press the mixture into the silicone mold. You may have to refrigerate (or freeze) your shaped cake balls longer so they hold their shape, but otherwise, you will follow the same process for making a basic cake pop (which we outline here!)

Cake Pops Off the Stick

These are the only pops in this post (and possibly that I’ve ever made!) where I’ve used candy melts instead of my favorite Ghirardelli melting wafers. So the two big differences between our usual cake pop instructions and making decorative cake pops like these that are colorful and off the stick are:

1. If you have a colorful idea (like these beachy and monster pops), I recommend using candy melts the color you envision. I have found that using food dye to color white chocolate changes the consistency (making it clumpy) which does not work to cover a cake pop. Candy melts are thicker than the melting wafers I like to use so using them to cover cake pops means you have to add oil – I use coconut or vegetable – to thin out the consistency for dipping.
2. This may seem obvious, but the only other big difference between making a cake pop your usual way is to skip the portion where you adhere a stick to your cake balls. This actually makes them harder to cover, in my opinion, because you don’t have the stick to hold as you dip them so I typically use two forks to lower the cake ball into the dipping chocolate and then place them on parchment paper or aluminum foil (something they won’t stick to!) because they won’t be elevated as they harden like they would on a stick.

Would you like to see a more detailed tutorial for any of these designs/combinations? If so, let us know in the comments and we’ll write one up! Thanks for reading!!