MINI CUPCAKE POPS!

   This diy/recipe comes from www.comeonilene.com .  Enjoy these tasty little treats!

For my friend Jane’s bridal shower, I volunteered to make cupcake pops. After seeing cute pictures floating around on the web, I’ve been dying to try it myself and Bakerella makes it seem so simple. It must be easy for the normal person, but I am clearly anything but normal and this project took a lot longer than I thought. Don’t attempt to make these unless you really love the person you are making them for. It took me over 8 hrs from start to finish, not including the time it took to make the stand. (I this idea directly from Bakerella’s website.)

Ingredients:

1 13X9 baked cake (from a box cake mix or from scratch)
1 can cream cheese frosting (or about 2 cups equivalent from scratch)
1 flower shaped cookie cutter
1 package chocolate melts
1 package white chocolate melts
gel food coloring
5″ lollipop sticks
m&ms and sprinkles

1. Bake a cake from a mix or from scratch and cool completely. I used a boxed red velvet cake. At this point, my husband spied the cooling cake and started lingering, hoping for a bite. I shooed him away.
2. Add can of cream cheese frosting or homemade frosting.
3. Blend thoroughly using a spoon, pastry cutter or hands. At this point the cake is starting to look pretty disgusting and my husband, seeing the mushy mess and my red stained fingers, quickly lost interest and left the kitchen.
4. Roll cake mixture into 1.25″ – 1.5″ size balls and lay on a lined cookie sheet. Chill in refrigerator for several hours or you can speed things up by putting into the freezer for about 15 minutes.

5. Find a flower shaped cookie cutter. Mine is about 1.25″ wide and came in a package of other mini cutters. They are the perfect size for these cake pops.
6. Take the chilled ball and roll it into an oval shape and then slide into cookie cutter. Push it into cutter until about half fills the cutter and the rest sticks out of the top, use yourpalm to create a round mound.
7. Then push the shaped cupcake carefully out of the cookie cutter.
8. Set right side up on a wax paper covered cookie sheet. Continue with remaining balls of dough. Cover and chill in the freezer for 15 minutes. Or if you’d like to dip the cupcakes the next day, you can cover and chill overnight in the fridge.

9. Melt chocolate in a bowl in the microwave in 30 second intervals, stirring in between. The candy melts that I used took about 60 seconds to melt all the way. Dip the bottom part of the cupcake in the chocolate
10. Turn upside down on a lined cookie sheet and insert lollipop stick halfway into the cupcake while the chocolate is still wet. Its nearing midnight so I beseeched my husband to come back and help stick the lollipop sticks in before the chocolate hardened. I realized later that husband was sticking the lollipop sticks all the way through to the other side of the cupcake. Oops, they fell right through the stick when I turned them over! Groan. Let chocolate harden and ban husband from doing any further damage in the kitchen.
11. Melt white chocolate in a bowl in the microwave. I made some cupcakes with white “frosting” and some with purple “frosting” by adding a few small drops of purple gel food coloring into the white chocolate. (note: do not use liquid food coloring, any amount of water or liquid will ruin the consistency of the chocolate) Dip the top part of the cupcakes into the white chocolate.
12. Set pops upright into a stand to let dry. You can poke holes into a styrofoam block to make a quick, cheap stand. I made mine out of an extra piece of 2×4 pine. (see tutorial here.) Add sprinkles while the “frosting” is still wet and and M&M on top:

Package them prettily in small cellophane wrappers and tie with a ribbon:

Allow my husband to have one as a treat!