Rainbow Inside the Gold: Lucky St. Patrick's Day Cake Pops

Oh, how I love holidays!  Any holiday.  Actually, any special event will do.  It gives me an excuse to make cake pops!  With March 17th rapidly approaching, what an excuse for me to make another batch of rainbow cake pops.  But these aren't just any rainbow cake pops.  These will be lucky gold cake pops with rainbow cake inside.  So instead of finding gold at the end of the rainbow, you'll find a rainbow inside of the gold.  A twist on the typical St. Paddy's day theme, but it works, I think.  And since these special lucky cake pops are destined to be consumed by about 40 preschoolers, I don't think they'll care what the typical theme of St. Patrick's day is!

For those of you who have already viewed my tutorial about how to make rainbow cake pops, you'll see some similar info here.  I used a white cake mix (sans oil), and prepared five different bowls with electric gel colors.  They're kind of like neon colors, bright and colorful.  I used electric purple, electric blue, electric green, electric orange, and electric yellow for the colors of my springtime rainbow.

Each color was poured into 6 separate lined cupcake cups.  I was able to get six cupcakes of each color from one batch of cake mix.

After they were baked, then cooled, I peeled off the paper liners and separated them into bowls:  one for each color.  Then they were well crumbled.  Keep each color well apart from the other colors, or else you'll end up with different colored crumbs in your cake crumble mix!

Add barely a teaspoon of frosting into each bowl of crumbs.  Remember that you don't need a lot of frosting in cake pops, or else you'll get mush!  Mix the frosting well.

Then take the crumbs for each color and make one huge cake ball.  So for the orange crumbs, you will make one huge cake ball.  For the blue crumbs, you will make one huge cake ball.  Get it?  There is a reason for this!

Set your big cake balls into separate bowls.  Don't refrigerate them.  You're going to get to work!

Set up a work station, ideally somewhere you can sit with a table.  Have 5 small clean plates, a roll of plastic wrap, and a cookie sheet on this table with your big cake balls.  Now, get yourself some coffee, then have a seat.  You're going to be working for about 2 hours constructing these cake balls, so make yourself comfy!  Of course, if you have a helper or two (I did not), this will go much more quickly.

Ready?  Go!

 Pinch off a small amount from one of the big cake balls.  Work with one color at a time so you don't mix your colors.  Roll it in your hands until you get a small ball.  It should be about the size of a marble.  Place it on your clean plate.  You want to aim for about 1/5 of each color in the pop for an even distribution of color.  You should end up with about 40-45 cake 'marbles' from each color.






When you've turned your big cake ball into lots of little cake 'marbles', cover them all with plastic wrap, wash your hands, and sit back down.  Take a few sips of your coffee.  Stretch.

Do NOT refrigerate your 'marbles'- you need them soft for when you make the rainbow cake ball.  All right, ready for the assembly?

Take one marble of each color.  You should have five, if you haven't been keeping up with me.  Place them in a pentagon formation.

Smush them together gently.

Then work them into a ball.  Voila!  You've made your rainbow cake ball!















Place your new creation on a cookie sheet, and lightly cover it with plastic wrap.  You will need a sheet of plastic large enough to cover the whole tray.  This way, you can place your cake balls under the plastic wrap and they won't dry out while you assemble the rest of the batch.

When you have no more marbles left of one color, you can get creative and put together whatever color mixes you want- like I've shown here.

Now that you've created your cake balls, go ahead and make sure they're well-covered with plastic wrap and put them into the refrigerator.  Leave them there for a few hours so they can firm up.  If you don't do this step, your cake balls will likely fall off the stick when you try to dip them.

After a few hours, you're ready for dipping!  I like to put my chilled cake balls into batches of 9 or 10 in small Ziploc containers.  It helps to keep the small batch I have out of the fridge cool.  And it speeds things up when you're ready to dip some more cake pops (remember that I don't use an appliance to keep my candy coating warm when I dip).  Also, by moving the balls into containers, I avoid the condensation buildup that always seems to drip on my cake balls from the plastic wrap.  And sometimes I don't always get the plastic completely over the cake balls in the refrigerator.  You know what happens?  They dry out quickly and crack when you put the stick in them!  Little containers avoid that altogether.

Okay, so for those of you who don't know about candy melts, here are some general tips.

1. Keep the temperature of your candy melts UNDER 100 DEGREES.  If you heat more than that, your coating will become really, really, grumpy with you and it will thicken up like molasses.  You won't end up with smooth, thin coating at all.  Be sure to use a candy thermometer.  I do.  Every single time I melt candy coating.
2. Use about a tablespoon or two of either paramount crystals or Crisco shortening per 14 oz bag of melts to thin your candy  melts.  I have yet to meet anyone (who successfully makes lots of cake pops, that is!) who doesn't do this.  You just can't get good thin coating without it.  
3. Don't even think of getting water anywhere near your melted coating.  It'll make your coating thicken up in no time at all, and you can't salvage it for dipping.  Water and oil-based coating don't mix!
4. When melting using a microwave, be sure to heat your melts at 50% power for one minute, then at 50% power in thirty second intervals until you get everything melted.  STAY UNDER 100 DEGREES!!!

I used white Wilton's candy melts with paramount crystals in this batch.  Once melted, I stuck my stick in the melted coating.

Next I quickly put that into a cake ball.  Then I dipped!

NOTE:  If you want to have smooth coating around the whole cake pop (i.e., no lump of candy coating at the bottom "collar" around where your stick meets the cake pop), then you must dip your pop very quickly after inserting the stick.  This "collar" of coating is still wet, and it will melt with the additional coating when you dip the entire thing.  If you let it sit out, or refrigerate the pop when it looks like the photo to the left, this lump will stay visible.  If your cake/frosting mix is the right consistency, it should not fall off the stick when you immediately dip.  If it falls off, your cake/frosting mix is too soft.

I had to be careful not to tap too much excess off because if I did, then you could see the colors through the white coating.  And if you make your coating too thin, then you may end up with cracking, too!

Okay, so now I've got almost 50 white cake pops.  Now to make 'em shine!

I took some gold luster dust and a dry decorating brush.

I dipped the brush in the dry powder and dusted the gold all over the cake pop.

It leaves a very nice sheen, and looks quite elegant.