Cake pops

Cake pops

Here in Maynooth we held one of the only two (according to the site) vegan bake sales as part of Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale week, the other being hosted by the Vegetarian Society of Ireland. This meant of course that the new recipes this week would be baked goods!

For my part I suggested we make some cake pops, which my Canadian friends tell me are a big sensation and go down well. Having looked up some recipes online, we found that it seems any cake mixture can really be used and any frosting mixed with it to make them!

     1.  So we made two general sponge cakes, one vanilla and one chocolate and once baked we mashed them into large crumbs. We then made a frosting consisting of ½ cup margarine and 1½ cups icing sugar and added this to each bowl of cake crumbles.

-     2. Once done we rolled them into balls and put them in a container into the freezer. Having the balls touching didn’t seem to make any difference luckily, as they didn’t stick together!

-     3.  By the time we removed them from the freezer and brought them to Conor’s (who doesn’t have internet!) we realised we didn’t save any recipes for the pops at all. Thinking this didn’t matter, and from the pictures we’d seen, we proceeded to make cake icing to cover the balls in. Big mistake it turns out – the icing just flowed off the cake balls. I tried thickening it so much that it wouldn’t, but the balls just broke when I tried applying it then.

-    4.   Having gotten very distressed that this was really not working, Conor came to my rescue and suggested we cover them in melted chocolate instead. I left him to it so and delightedly we found this was perfect! Amusingly, next time we had access to the internet we found that icing isn’t even used to cover cake pops, it’s chocolate and such things instead!

Definitely a great, though time consuming thing to make. We made some more for the VSI Bake Sale this Saturday, along with cupcake size versions of the strawberry tofu ‘cheesecake’.

Oh and to liften my spirits after the initial icing disaster, we made some vegan baileys by the recipe here: http://ohsheglows.com/2012/03/12/homemade-baileys-irish-creammade-vegan/

Even when we tried it without the whiskey, this was just amazing!