When Ramsay and I moved into our new apartment in Mar Vista, our friends Berek and Cindy gave us an awesome, thoughtful housewarming present – a cake pop maker! I have always wanted to try making cake pops, especially since I don’t have much of a sweet tooth – a bite or two of cake is just perfect for me. Cake pops seemed like a great fun, easy, perfectly-portioned baking activity.

I brought the Bella cake pop maker and a kit to my parents? house so that my mom and I could make them together. The kit includes chocolate cake mix, vanilla frosting mix, lollipop sticks and sprinkles. You need to provide vegetable oil, milk, one egg, butter and heavy whipping cream, just as if you were making any other boxed cake mix.

Making the cake pops is super easy! You just mix the cake ingredients with a hand mixer, grease the cake pop maker with oil, wait for it to heat up (like 2 minutes) and then pour the batter in the molds. The cake pops cook in 4-5 minutes. It’s amazing how quickly and easily they cook! A lot of online reviews complained about the cake pops not being round, but mine were perfectly round every single time! And the oil helped them pop right out of the molds.

The mix said it would make 18 cake pops, but it ended up making 33. That’s a LOT of cake pops. After they come out of the machine, you freeze them for 30 minutes to help them harden, then mix the frosting.

Now HERE is where the trouble began. The frosting is just that – frosting. It’s thick, hard to manage, and stays soft and wet. The instructions said to”roll the cake pop in the frosting between 2 forks until it is evenly coated”. Well that doesn’t work, because the frosting is too thick to simply “roll” a cake pop through. The frosting also doesn’t cover evenly WHATSOEVER. These perfectly round cake pops were soon deformed beyond recognition, with huge clumps of frosting on one side and bare cake on the other side. Even worse, the frosting doesn’t harden. So when you stick the pops in styrofoam to settle, the frosting just drips down the cake pop, down the stick and onto the ground. What a sticky mess!

Adding the sprinkles helped their appearance a bit, but like I said, they turned out super ugly and very messy. They also aren’t portable – keeping them chilled is the only way to keep the frosting somewhat at bay. The second they start to thaw, the frosting drips everywhere.

I think the next time I make cake pops, I’m going to nix the frosting altogether in lieu of my world-famous homemade icing. I make this icing for my from-scratch Christmas cookies. Not only is this icing super easy to make, but it actually hardens into a shell. That way, it won’t make a mess and drip everywhere like frosting does. It’s also easier to coat things evenly. Lastly, you can even add food coloring to it to make different color icing (although it will all taste like vanilla).

I’ll try that out and update y’all! And stay tuned this December when I post my world-famous sugar cookie and homemade icing recipes on the blog for you to enjoy and get fat with.