Success: Cake Pops

I can't remember anymore what inspired me to do this, even though it was only two weeks ago. For some reason I just really got it in my head that I needed to make a banana rum cake. I think it may have stemmed from something as simple as having overripe bananas and wanting to seize the opportunity. From there, of course the natural inclination was to throw rum on it. I mean, c'mon, that's just what one does with bananas.

After sorting through many a cake recipe, I settled on this banana rum cake (minus the pecans, I tend to omit any non-essential nut from my recipes). I didn't have a yellow cake mix on hand but I did have a french vanilla one. I worried it might be a little too sweet to use, but heck, there's more than one way to skin a cat (though it worked fine in my recipe in the end, I wouldn't recommend using french vanilla cake mix to skin a cat).

With the rum not being cooked in the frosting, of course it gave it a strong-ish alcohol flavor that may not fit all palettes, but I made the cake for a party full of wild young English teachers so I wasn't too concerned. In my opinion (read: the opinion of a flavor-lover and a lush) the alcohol balance was perfect. You could really taste it and enjoy it, but it didn't have a deathly bite.

I got a bit creative from here, as I started by baking them in mini bundt cake pans. I was a little annoyed at first because the only mini pans I had featured autumnal 3D designs on the top, but it was easy enough to cut them off and flip them over to use the domed bottom as a top. Voila, instant adorableness!

This is where my product split off in 3 ways. 1) As-is, 2) whipped cream chocolate pudding, and 3) cake pops.


1) I was surprised with some last minute presents, so to say thank you I just wrapped a couple up and sent them home with some Japanese friends.


2) I wanted to thank another of my adult students for a really big favor, partially why I made the cakes to begin with, but since the cake was already so sweet and the frosting was even sweeter, I knew I couldn't go ahead with my plan to give them fully decorated to a Japanese man who doesn't like sweets. Instead I whipped up some cream and some chocolate pudding and made these.

#3) The cake pops. Though it killed me to smash up such cute little cakes, I knew I'd just eat them if I left them lying around. I could get two birds with one stone by making them into cake pops - another concept cross off the experiments list and an easier way to share them with others. I added a little salt to the frosting to cut the sweetness the best I could and mashed the cake and frosting together in a painfully delicious mess of sugary joy. In the end, after having given away a few of the cakes, I had a bit too much frosting in the cake to frosting ratio, but I could still make them into balls and after freezing them they held their shape long enough to set. Even dipped in the warm chocolate I only lost a few to them dropping off their sticks (next time I'll try to find skewers without a sharp tip that constantly threatens to pierce through). Dipped in the chocolate and drizzled with white chocolate, the whole banana rum sugar sweetness deal turned out all right, too!

It was fun too, being able to play with the white chocolate designs on top. Of course there's a million and one shapes and gimmicks to make cake pops in, but simple, classic, truffle designs lend a certain beauty and grace to a cake pop if you want to keep it classy. I look forward to experimenting with shapes in the future and have drawn some out in my sweets notebok, but I think for now my favorite is just the classic spiral.


Topped off with tiny little bags from the 100 yen shop they were perfectly portable and sharable, the perfect thing to bring to my friend's birthday party out in the the big city pubs. My only regret was how easy it was for me to snack on the failed pops! I think I ate something like 10 of them before I'd realized what I'd done lol

In news of frazzled crossovers between my laziness and my constant shortage on time, I did end up bagging them while the white chocolate was still wet. It made things a little shmeery, but not as bad as it could have been. I'm not too bent out of shape about it lol I also learned that the underlying shape is really important when dipping. If you want those perfectly round balls you best get a melon baller. I kind of liked the homemade look of these. Though I whipped them out super quickly, everyone still said how beautiful they were, which just goes to show that if you drizzle anything with chocolate the inexactness of it stops mattering lol