 Hello everyone, my name is Rachel Sereno. I am the owner of S.D.L. Cake Pops. We are a custom cake pop bakery based of St. Charles's Missouri. And today I'm going to show you how to make a basic cake pop from a cake, a basic cake all the way through a dipping. And so today I've got a few ingredients here to show you. First of all I have a 9 by 13 inch cake made of pre baked already for you. For purposes of cake pops and if you're a home-baked I do recommend that you just use a regular box mix and just make it up as usual. What we do is always use a little less oil than recommended on the box mix and that helps to keep firm cake ball and not too moist or too oily. The second thing that we have here is some frosting. You can use buttercream frosting, you can use from scratch made frosting or you can just use regular old store bought frosting to match the flavor of your cake. And then of course over here we have some plain white chocolate chips. These you can also use candy melts that are easily purchased at your craft store or your local grocery stores. Wilton carries a great line of them. We use white chocolate here in the bakery but if you wanted a different color you could use it. Definitely use candy melts. Then of course we've got some sprinkles to make our cake pops fun once we have dipped them. We've just got two kinds today. Some other things that we will need today will be a large bowl to mix your cake into and we will also have a couple spoons, a serrated knife which I'll show you what we're going to do with that shortly. We use wine or gloves in the bakery but you can definitely use your hands at home. That's not a problem at all. Toothpick again toothpicks essential to the cake pop making world and I will explain to you in a little bit when we dip why we need toothpick. Lollie sticks again easily purchased from your craft store or local grocery store in the cake aisle. In the bakery we use a Wilton can of melting pop for melting our chocolate candy melts which is great if you want to purchase one and use them at home but you don't have to. We do you can melt them in a glass jar or a glass cup or you can even use a silicone bowl. The only thing I would recommend is make sure that you have a nice wide enough mouth to dip your cake pop fully into there. Do not use very narrow glasses like a champagne flute or really narrow glasses. That would be the only thing. You want to melt the candy melts when you're doing it in the microwave you want to do it at 30 second intervals so that you don't burn your candy melt on chocolate but once melted you should have a nice runny consistency just like that. Alright we're ready to start making our cake pops. We're going to start with making the dough for the cake pops. Here is the cake that's been baked in cool. I recommend cooling it overnight or at least several hours so that you don't work with a very soft moist cake and it falls apart on you. That's where our serrated knife comes in. I like to cut my cakes in quarters that's easier to work with. Here is just one quarter. This is a yellow cake that we made. I'm just going to lift it off. Gather up any pieces you have. Now as you can see the cake is yellow inside but on the top we've got a nice brown crust. We always take the skin off. It's what we call it the skin of the cake. So the serrated knife just helps you kind of easily remove it and if you've got any crusty corners this is a good time to remove it. It just helps with the texture of your cake pops once you start rolling them. Also once you roll them you'll be able to see a yellow cake inside versus a yellow cake with maybe some brown specs in it. That's the reason why we remove our skin of browning from the cake. Even underneath just depends on your oven. Sometimes your cake may not have a brown bottom but if it does we just kind of remove a little bit off of it. Again this is also mostly for appearance purposes. We want to make sure the cake ball looks like a yellow cake and not a brown cake. Alright so now we've got this cake piece into the bowl here. We're going to do a quarter of a cake today. We're not going to do the whole cake but of course you can do the whole cake at one time into bowl. What I'm just going to do is just crumble it up and I will bring this up in a moment. You're just using your fingertips to break the cake up into fine crumbles. You don't want to smooth it a squeezy at this point. You just want to use your fingertips to really get in there and break the cake up. I will show you this in a second. You can start feeling the cake come together but you just want to then crumbs at this point. You don't want to kind of... So this is what you're going to end up with. Cake crumbs that just crumbled up with your fingertips. Now we're going to add some frosting into the cake. With a small quantity of cake like this, we'll start with a small spoon and even with a large cake just depends on how moist your cake is. Always start with less because you can always add more and not take it out. So in this case I'm probably only going to start with about that much of a teaspoon of frosting into this cake here. Drop it in and you just want to combine that with the cake mix. So you can see it's starting to come together here. Just like dough and you just want to keep squeezing it with the frosting and pressing it all together and give your fingers and your arms a good work out here. Once your dough starts coming together, you just want to... Instead of adding more frosting, all you want to do is just kind of bring all the crumbs that's left and your bowl together. You're almost done here and this is all the crumbs that I put in to brought together with that little bit of frosting. You just want to squeeze into a big dough ball. It should feel like the consistency of play dough here. And so there you go. Okay now we have all dough ball ready. Now a cake ball dough. This is not raw dough. It's made from the cake. So it has to kind of look and have the consistency of raw cookie dough but it is not raw. Now to portion it out and roll it into balls, we use a cookie scoop and this is about a one and a half tablespoon cookie scoop if you want to or if you're really good at portioning it, you can always pull off a chunk of dough and roll it. But with the cookie scoop, you kind of get some consistency with it. So all you want to do is just scoop out some dough into your cookie scoop just like that. And you're going to have a nice portion dough just met much. And now to roll the cake ball here's some tips. You don't want to just start rolling from here. You're not going to get a smooth ball. What you want to do is really need that portion of dough that you have. And a good way to do it is use your palms and kind of just fold it in on itself. And then you want to kind of start bringing it together as a ball. And what you're doing is you're kind of giving it some gentle but firm pressure right in between the palms of your hands. So you want to keep rolling until you get a nice cake ball just like that. And it's smooth. Now if you have any cracks on your cake ball, anything you can always use your finger to just kind of pinch it close. For example, right there you can just kind of use it to close it up a little bit and make it smooth. Do a quick roll. Now every cake also behaves differently. Vanilla and chocolate is about the easiest to work with. But if you start working with unique cake flavors, you will find that rolling also may be slightly different for you. But you just have to keep adjusting and going with it. So there you have the ball. Now what we will do with this cake ball is actually cover it with a clear wrap and refrigerate this for at least 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on what kind of time you have in terms of your process of making the cake box. But we do recommend at least chilling it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before dipping the cake. So for purposes of this video, we have already chilled some cake balls. Right here they are nice and firm. They're not as squishy and soft. They're actually firm because they've been refrigerated. But we've also removed them from the refrigerator for another at least 30 minutes to come to somewhat of a room temperature. What will happen is if you have a very cold chilled cake ball and really warm hot chocolate and you're dipping it together, you can have cracks in your chocolate once you dip it. So again, you want to bring it out and just bring it to somewhat very temperature before dipping. All right, we're now ready to dip our cake balls. Like I mentioned earlier, we already have pre-rolled these two cake balls and chilled it so they are firm to the touch. And now one thing to remember when making cake puffs even at home is to always be prepared because chocolate sets really fast depending on the temperature in your kitchen that day or what kind of fan going or you have an air conditioning going that may also affect the temperature of the chocolate and the weight sets. So we want to have everything prepared and make sure you have all your tools right in front of you before you start dipping. So we've got the chocolate already pre-melted and it's kind of in a one state, not hot and it's in a fairly good consistency. Now this is a little secret that I want to share with you that you probably have not heard of. It's tapping the bubbles out of the cake pop to get a nice smooth finish on the coating of your cake pop. And so all we do is just tap the toilet pop to get the bubbles out and then you can see in here you can see some bubbles if the camera can catch that but as you tap them you will see the little bubbles kind of disappear and the surface of your chocolate becomes really really smooth. So that's what you're looking for. You can't get all the bubbles out but you can get the majority of them and especially when you start working with colored candy melts this is a vital part because when you dip your cake pops all you'll have is a lot of bubbles on your cake pop which can result in oil leaks. So that's a little tip that you get from us. So tap all out. What I like to do that's why a paper towel comes in handy is to clean the rim of your pot and I'll show you why. If you want a neat and tidy cake pop this is also important. Now you've got your cake ball. Once you've already rolled them and set them on wax paper and in the fridge and chilling you will get a flat bottom on your cake pop. Cake ball sorry and this is where you want your stick to go in especially if you're going to have your cake pop upright on a stick like that because if you do it the other way around you're going to have a flat top cake pop not very pretty. So here we go. We're going to start with dipping the stick into the chocolate about half an inch or so. We're just going to coat the stick lightly and then we're going to hold the ball in our palm to keep it sturdy and we're just going to straight in. We're going to just slowly gently slide the stick right in and what this does is create this little rim right here that actually pro that acts as a glue for the cake pops and when you're dipping it's not falling off. So here we go. We're going to let the set. We're going to stick that into our handy dandy stand. Now this is a special stand that we have. If anybody's interested we can leave a link in our comments for you but you know if you're doing it at home or regular style from block will work just as well for you to stick your stick into. I'm going to do the second one here real quick. Right there holding it on the flat bottom. We're going to stick the stick right there and you want your stick to go about half ways about three quarters way. You want to make sure that it's not going through all the way through the end because you're going to have your cake pop break and then your stick pop out the other end. So we're going to let that set. Now we'll be right back once this bottom piece dries up and then we're going to go ahead and start dipping in. Alright so now we're ready to dip this. Our chocolate on the bottom from the stick is now hardened and sealed. You don't want to do it as wet. The whole purpose of this is really to seal the stick to the cake pop and keep it sturdy while dipping. So all you're going to do is take it in, dip it into your chocolate and you just want to make sure that it meets the stick. You don't want to dunk it in and have the chocolate all over your stick and when you bring it out you want to put your head closer to the cake ball and you just want to shake it gently. You don't want to hold it back here and start shaking it. You see there's a lot of bounce to the cake pop and that is not good for it. It's going to fall right off the stick. So hold it close, shake it and then to remove some of the excess you just want to tap your wrist gently. And then you want to swirl your cake pop, you've got that and if you tap your wrist gently it settles in and you've got a nice smooth coating all around and this is where your sprinkles come in. Gently scoop, you can use your finger, you can use a spoon, you can dunk it all in, cover the whole thing but I kind of like the little covering on the top just coming down a touch just gives it a really cute look here. That's a little. All right and then if you've got straight sprinkles if you want to pat them down you can do so right now. You just set it in your stand let it set. I'm going to show you one more time that way you have a second point of reference. I'm going to do the other sprinkles now. So again just holding it, dip it right into your chocolate, make sure just gently don't shake it, don't swirl it. You just want to let it sit there, let the chocolate meet the ends of the stick, hold it close, shake it. The other thing you can do if you don't want to tap your wrist is to gently just tap it on the side of the rim and that is why we wiped off the rim so that you don't get chocolate stains all over your stick. So you're just going to tap it gently swirl it to you've got that swirl but you don't want to leave it there. You just want to tap it into your cake pop so you get a nice smooth all around look right there. Then here you go into your sprinkles with this again just covering if you want to cover the whole thing that's fine too. Like I said I kind of like my little sprinkle top of look the little coming down the sides and I'm just going to pat it in and it's very important at this point to also remove a lot of the access to the chocolate. If you don't what you're going to end up with is having chocolate and your sprinkles just flow down your stick. So you want to shake it and tap it as much as you can off the cake ball before you go ahead and put your sprinkles and stand it up. But there you go you have two perfectly dipped and rolled puffs. Thank you for joining us today we hope you enjoyed this video and enjoy making cake pops on your own at home. If you have any questions just leave us a comment below and click like on this video if you like it and also stay tuned for further videos that we will be doing we'll be doing some basic tutorials as well as some advanced tutorials if you already are a pro cake pop maker with sharing with you some of our little tips and secrets from the bakery. If you have any request of what you would like to see as far as tutorials feel free to leave us comments and if we can we will definitely make it for you. Thank you.