After writing papers all day, I decided to bake some Valentine's Day desserts. Baking for me is a stress reliever. Last year, after coming home from a horrible day at work, wanting to ring out someone's head off, I got off my butt and baked! Lo and behold, a super fudgy mint cupcake recipe was born.
I've made strawberry cakes before, but not strawberry cake pops. For the cake, I took Food Network's Hummingbird Cake recipe and added two essential ingredients, pureed strawberries and strawberry extract. This cake recipe was perfect all by its own and now I have to mush the cake to make the pops.
Instead of rolling the prepared cake pop batter into balls, I had a stroke of genius and took out my round and heart shaped fondant cutters. It's Valentine's day after all and I needed a heart shaped cake pop. As I'm shaping my batter, I went ahead and melted my dark chocolate candy coating on a double broiler. I love using the Ghirardelli Melting chocolate better than Wilton's. Ghirardelli has a smoother and richer taste and when it dries, it dries somewhat into this hard yet smooth chocolate. In another double broiler, I started to melt the pink Wilton Candy melts. I'm not really a big fan of Wilton's candy melts since it doesn't melt as well as Ghirardelli and that I had to add so a lot of vegetable shortening or paramount crystals which add more calories and fat to the chocolate.
Once the chocolates were melted, I went and dipped the pops, half of them in the dark chocolate and half of them in the pink vanilla. I have eaten three of these already... the ones that didn't make the cut.
Some of the irregulars, I took them to work and gave it to two of my co-workers. One of them ate two of the irregulars. I've decided to give him the irregulars since the last time I made some cake pops, he ate his wife's share. This time, I wanted to make sure she got some instead of his husband eating all of it. Which by the way, he almost did. For the whole day, I have to constantly check to see if he's even left one pop for her. Whew! He did!
