Jack-O-Lantern / Halloween Pumpkin Cake Pops

I've been busy lately with a new obsession of making French macarons.  For those of you who are familiar with these little delicacies, you know how amazing they are- amazingly difficult to make, that is!  But now I've decided to jump back into familiar- and much easier- territory with cake pops.

 I love Halloween!  Along with all the decorations I'm building for our haunted house display, I thought it fit to create a batch of pumpkin cake pops- and some of them have become jack-o-lantern cake pops as well.  Keep reading to learn how I made these cuties!

I used a spice cake mix for this batch.  I made them  with a little more frosting than I normally use because I wanted them to be able to hold the ridges that would make them look more pumpkin-like.  Here, I used a long bamboo skewer to make my ridges.  You could use a lollipop stick, or even a toothpick if you want.

Roll the ball onto the stick several times in different places.  You want your indentations to be deep so they show up nicely.  When you dip these in the candy coating, the ridges won't seem as prominent.  They don't need to be perfect.  Think "pumpkin"!  Every one of them is quite unique with regards to their form.

  Ridged out and ready for the refrigerator.  I made the ridges when the cake balls were still soft because it was easier to mold them in this state.

I cut up sour apple straws to make the tops of the pumpkins.  I could eat sour apple straws all day long.  Sigh.  Yum!

I only had white candy melts, so I added orange, yellow, and red oil-based coloring to make the orange candy coating.  I added a LOT of coloring.  This was a HUGE mistake for me that I will elaborate on later.

Here's a cake ball ready to dip.

Dipping the stick before putting it into the cake ball.

The stick stuck into the cake ball.

Dipping the pop!  Try to dip in one quick in and out motion- don't keep dunking or twist it around.  You might end up with crumbs in your coating, or your cake ball might even decide to stay for a swim.

Cleanly dipped.  See how there is no excess coating around the base of the stick?  Make sure you tap off the excess well on these so the ridge detail shows up.

Ah!  It's a pumpkin pop!

To add the green stems, take a little extra melted candy coating, and apply it to the top of the pop with a toothpick.

Here's the stem made of sour apple straw!

Stem on!  I like that with pumpkin cake pops that if the coating isn't perfect, it still looks great.  It makes it look all the more organic, in my opinion.

It's a pumpkin patch of cake pops!

Okay, so if you're still following me, I mentioned earlier how I made a HUGE mistake by adding a boatload of oil-based coloring to my coating.  Here it is.  Cracking in the coating.  Over HALF of my cake pops ended up cracking horribly.  The only thing I did differently in this batch than in other batches was that I added an ungodly amount of coloring to it.  So avoid this disaster, and buy pre-colored melts if you can.  I like adding color to my melts, but usually only do it in small amounts.

I think I also added too much thinning agent (paramount crystals) to my melts.  I wanted to have really thin coating so the ridge detail would show up, so I added double the amount of crystals to my melts.  Unfortunately, I think I ended up making it much too thin.   This combined with the huge amount of extra oil coloring made for a very weak coating- susceptible to cracking.  Lesson learned for next time!

And here is a completed jack-o-lantern cake pop.  The face was drawn on with an edible ink pen.  Very easy, and super cute!








Happy Halloween cake poppin' to everyone!