I have to admit that I'm usually not a fan of machines for cooking. I just don't like kitchen gadgets that serve one purpose (ie make one thng). Like waffle makers,"Big City Slider" pans, corn stripper, juicers, electric can openers etc. Maybe its the engineer in me, I always want the most efficient, compact, multipurpose tool for the job. It still boggles me why a company can't make a decent food processor/blender combo. There are those machines out there, but when you read the reviews on them people are always complaining that it does one task poorly or worse, both task mediocrely. Maybe if I had a grand kitchen I would feel differently, but for now space is limited and I try not to have too many space hogging kitchen gizmos around.
When I received this Babycakes Cake Pop maker, I was thinking great, I will spend two days using it, 10 years in the pantry, 1 day at a yard sale and a thousand years in a landfill. But then my sister knocked on our door and dropped off some homemade Christmas cookies. I was so unprepared to give her anything in return I looked at the cake pop maker and decided to see what this thing was made of. I used Duncan Hines Yellow cake mix (all I had on hand). I always substitute the water with whole milk when I use cake mix (which incidentally that's what people recommend you do for this machine). I filled up the mix in a ziploc, snipped the corner and filled the liitle domes. It was surprisingly easy and not that messy. The instructions said not to overfill the domes, but I did so anyway because I was thinking that there was no way that the dough would rise to double in size to make a ball. Boy was I wrong. You can see the images below of what happens when you over fill the domes.
This little machine actually did impress me. It created perfect little spheres in less than 5 minutes. They tasted just OK (like how box cake mix tastes). I would say that the best thing about it is the speed at which you can make a bunch of these balls. The machine also came with a syrninge so you can inject filling. I happend to have a box of th
e Ferrero Rocher chocolates so I decided to do something creative with the packaging. One of my sister's favorite chocolate is Ferrero Rocher, so I decided to fill the pops with Nutella and dip them in white chocolate. I could have dipped rolled it in hazelnuts too but I didn't have any on hand. I removed all of the packaging from the original box of chocolates and put the cake balls in instead.
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| Finished cake balls (can't call them pops) |
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| The left is what happens when you over fill. The right was my attempt. |
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| I could eat Nutella with a spoon straight from the can. |
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| Chocolates with the packaging removed |
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| Filled with Nutella and dipped in white chocolate. For a tutorial on how to dip anything into chocolate go here. |
A few tips on using this machine:
Do not overfill
The instructions say to turn on the machine and then fill the domes. This never worked for me. It was easier to plug in the machine only after the domes were filled. Or else the pops would start cooking and overflowing over before half the domes were filled.
The cake mix makes over 5 dozen cake pops. All in all the machine is pretty cool. It could be useful for parents that need to bake their kids treats for a class party, since its fast. I also made donut-holes with it a few days later. Those tasted wonderful. Stay tuned for that recipe.
I feel like I need to write this part: I was not paid or compensated to write this article, this machine was actually given to me by a friend that has no relationship to the manufacturer of this machine. The opinions are completely my own.
