Fresh Bread Bakes: Gluten Free Cake Pops

Apparently, cake pops (as popularised on Bakerella and a few other blogs) are the in thing to take to first birthday parties. Little balls of cake on sticks! Which are then covered in melted chocolate and decorated!

I was the recipient of a leftover pop at work one day, and, wanting to bring something to a first birthday party of a dear little man, I looked up the recipe and thought “hey… this seems achievable.” Let’s throw a spanner in the works at this point: I wanted to make them gluten free, because mum of Dear Little Man is coeliac.

Cake pop cross section, as backgrounded by Mr B’s hoodie.

Here’s how you go about creating your own gluten free cake pop extravaganza:

• Gluten free cake mix (you could make your own, but that’s not the labour intensive portion of this, and I didn’t have the right ingredients on hand)
• 1/2 cup of jam (think most jam is gluten free but do check)
• Packet of chocolate melts (I used white)
• Decorations of your choice (I used hundreds and thousands)
• Lollipop sticks – you can buy these at homewares shops, I didn’t check the supermarket. An alternative would potentially be paddle-pop sticks.

First: make the cake. It doesn’t matter if you squash it with your oven-mittened hand when pulling it out of the oven, because you’re going to crumble it anyway. Also, if it’s not quite cooked through, it isn’t the end of the world. Same reason.

Supermarket brand gluten free cake mix prepared.

Crumble the cake up when it’s cold into a bowl and add the raspberry jam, stirring to combine into a squidgy mess. Other recipes suggest cream cheese can also be used here, with equally pleasing results (and a chance to dial back on the sweetness).

Chocolate and berry is a good combination.

Roll into balls and refrigerate – I left mine overnight.

Get your supplies out…

When ready, melt the chocolate in a double boiler, stick a lollipop stick in each ball and twirl it in the chocolate mixture. It worked best when I twirled the upper part of the stick AND the ball in the chocolate. The ball was glued nicely onto the stick by the chocolate.

I then twirled mine in a plate of hundreds and thousands and set them on a (paper lined) tray to dry and harden.

Hundreds and thousands bowl

This is the most time consuming part of the process, and the sentence above in no way gives an indication of, if you are a klutz like me, just how many hundreds and thousands will be scattered around your kitchen post cake pop decoration. You can see a few in the photo above. There were more!

Production tray

Wait for them to set (doesn’t take long) and then arrange in your most kid-pleasing and garish arrangement. Parents will be cursing your name for the rest of the afternoon (look, I did warn them I could feel my teeth dissolving when I ate a sampler earlier on).

Cake pop tower – there is something magical about eating cake on sticks.

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