#40 - Peanut Butter Chocolate Cow Cake Pops

The time has come. You saw us make apple cake. You saw us make banana cupcakes. But now it's time for us to whip up a batch of what made Bakerella famous - cake pops.

We've tried cake pops before, following Bakerella's advice closely, and this is the first time we've decided to stray on our own. We're going with both a new recipe (peanut butter and chocolate) and a new design (cows). Here we go!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cow Cake Pops

A Hungry Hundred Original Recipe, Inspired by Bakerella
Since this is a Hungry Hundred Original Recipe, we didn't exactly know what to put in the mise en place picture. We used most of the stuff, but that chocolate pudding is completely unnecessary. Unless you want a snack while you're baking.
Cake pops are basically cake and icing covered with a candy coating and on a popsicle stick. We had chocolate cake, so in making peanut butter chocolate cake pops, we had two options - we could have vanilla icing and peanut butter candy coating or we could have peanut butter icing and a plainer candy coating.

Well, we decided to do a smaller batch of both, so to make the peanut butter icing, we just added peanut butter to vanilla icing and stirred it up.
Once you've got your frosting all ready, it's time to get your hands dirty. You smash up the cake, mix in the icing, and roll the mixture into little balls like you're making meatballs.
Then you plop those things in the freezer for a minute or two while they firm up, and it's a good time to get some of your decorations ready. Noses, ears, and eyes are all lined up.
So once you're cake balls are ready to go, you need to put a stick in them, and dip them in the candy coating.
Once the dipped cake pops dry, it's time to decorate them. We were making cows, so we added m&m eyes and ears, a pink chocolate-coated sesame seed for a nose, and the use of black edible marker for spots and pupils and what have you.
All in all, these cake pops were a success. Of course, they tasted yummy. It's cake and icing and candy. But they also looked really cute and weren't as difficult / messy to make as we feel they were last time.

The biggest problem is that some of them look more like cats or pigs than cows, but we still think they're pretty cute.
If you have the time, patience, and energy, here's what you need to do:

Ingredients

• 1 un-iced chocolate cake
• 1 container whipped vanilla icing
• Creamy peanut butter (optional)
• White candy coating or peanut butter-flavored light brown candy coating
• White m&m's
• Pink chocolate-coated sunflower seeds
• Black edible pen or icing gel

Additional Items

• Lollipop sticks
• Styrofoam block

Preparation

1. Crumble cake into large mixing bowl.
2. If you want to make peanut butter icing, scoop the vanilla icing into a small bowl, and mix in the peanut butter, a tablespoon at a time, until you get the desired amount of peanut butter flavor.
   
3. Mix in the can of icing and combine completely with hands.
4. Form small balls of mixture, about 1 inch in diameter, and lay on a cookie sheet.
5. Chill formed balls in the freezer for 15 minutes.
6. Melt the candy coating according to the directions on the package.
7. Dip one end of a lollipop stick into the candy coating, stick into a cake ball, and return ball to freezer, stick-side up.
8. After adding sticks to all the cake balls, cut an m&m in half, dip a small portion of each half in candy coating, and insert into the top of the cake ball as ears.
9. Once hardened, dip the entire cake pop into the candy coating and shake off excess.
10. Before the coating hardens, add two m&m's as eyes and a pink sunflower seed as a nose.
11. Let cake pops set upright in a styrofoam block.
12. Add nostrils, eyeballs, and cow spots as you like with black pen and/or icing gel.