Summer Inspired Ultimate Pimms Cake Pop / Truffles

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Jacqueline Jay

Pimms Cake Pops / Truffles

Because summer has now gone and in the UK we are destined for dreary weather pretty much all year round I crave the feeling of summer. Summer time traditionally brings it with it Pimms and weddings. The two combined set the scene for a marriage made in heaven. There is nothing more refreshing than an ice cold glass of pimms after watching nuptials out on a sunny lawn with sweet scent of freshly cut grass in the air. The chance to relax, chat with old friends and sip the summery nectar. Imagine the elegant silver platter being offered to guests piled high with white chocolate encased strawberry and vanilla cream cake pop / truffles with a hint of sunshine pimms, lushious strawberries and white chocolate – simply divine!

Even if you choose not to have a summer wedding these tiny balls of chocolate and strawberry pimms heaven would be a classy petit four where the sweetness would balance perfectly with champagne.

I want to take a step back into summer – so I am going to turn up the heating and will be baking these and then pulling on a posh frock and pouring a glass of bubbly before devouring them. Roll on the weekend.

The Taste Test – moist and packed full of summer flavours – like eating a strawberry milkshake with a hint of sunny pimms.

Ingredients:

1 x vanilla cake

1 x pimms buttercream

White chocolate cake covering or white belgian couverture cake covering drops ( if wanting to really impress)

Instructions for the Cake

1. Bake a basic vanilla cake / victoria sponge and leave to cool

Making Strawberry Pimms Buttercream

You could use a ready made strawberry sauce or make your own from scratch to add to the basic buttercream recipe.

Strawberry Sauce

250g Strawberries

1 tbsp vanilla sugar or sugar

Summery strawberries

1. Cut the strawberries into quarters and place in small saucepan

2. Add 1 tbsp of sugar – I used my own homemade vanilla sugar but normal sugar will work just fine

3. Cook on a medium heat , stirring the mixture for approx 5 mins so that the sugar has dissolved and the strawberries have softened

Cooking Strawberry Sauce

4. Remove the strawberries from the heat and mash the strawberries with a masher

5. Return to the heat for 2 – 3 minutes

6. Strain the strawberries through a fine sieve into a bowl so that you can capture of all of the strawberry goodness. You can keep the pulp if you wish to add real strawberry pieces to the cake pop/ truffle mixture later.

7. Leave to cool.

Making Strawberry Pimms Buttercream

1 quantity of basic buttercream

2-3 tbsp of strawberry sauce (to taste)

2-3 tbsp of of pimms (to taste)

Beat together well

1. Add this mixture to the cake crumbs to create cake pops / truffles – see how here

2. Dip in chocolate!

Pimms Cake Pops / Truffles

Ready to Roll your cake balls / truffles? See the guide here

Idea: you could do half the balls in white chocolate and th eother in milk choclate – perfect for those situations when you can not decide which to dip it in!

Cake pop art or chocolate heaven?

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Jacqueline Jay

Cake pop art or chocolate heaven?

Artistic cake pops

Whenever I search for cake pops I am usually inundated with images of cute bees, popcorn bags, scary ghosts or shoal of lollipop up their bottoms versions of Finding Nemos (how uncomfortable – that’s got to be worse than a thong!). You name it you can cake pop art it if you are artistic enough. Cake pops are wonderful and they do make me smile as they are cute. Sadly my artistic talents are lacking and if I were to make a cake pop bunny in real life this would end up looking more like a deformed dog. This would cause me the most amazing amount of frustration in my unrealistic quest for treat size perfectionism and definite tendencies towards OCD. Those that can weave their candy cake pop magic are very talented individuals to be sure – I hold my glass up to them but I accept that I am not truly worthy! If you want candy magic then look no further than the Queen of Cake Pops aka Bakerella. I even noticed that on the Junior Bake Off 2011 when a contestants cake went horribly wrong she though to herself – sod it cake pop it; what a smart girl she thought on her feet there.

Bakerella Cake Pops

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Knowing my own artistic boundaries and my families and friends unadulterated interest and glutenous need for chocolate (so much I hide it in the cleaning cupboard – nobody looks in there). I decided to create cake pops with a grown up indulgent air. The challenge was to create the little treat that is just too damn good for little fingers to touch. As for ‘if you love them, give them your last one’ – I don’t think so buster. I want cake pops that makes the taster go ‘oooh’ and ‘aahhhh’ as their mouthes fill with salty anticipative water while their eyes scan which chunk of chocolate to crack seductively first. I want my cake pops to have the same effect as Herbal Essence shampoo leaving its taster shouting yes! yes! yes! without any hesitation who is watching. This idea appeals to me far more than ‘ ooh doesn’t it look cute’ comment that I might get with a rather manky (well if it’s mine it would be) snowman during the melting process cake pop.

This is when I realise it’s not cake pops I am striving for its cake truffles. Yes, that’s sounds much more sophisticated and grown up. So what is a cake truffle? Well it’s a mash up between a tasty cake packed full of beautifully flavoured buttercream or cream cheese frosting. Then teh cake truffles are lovingly dipped in chocolate and decorated with more chocolate. So they are not just the rubbish bits you cut off a cake or a way to cover up your disaster in the kitchen (although you can do this and why not – waste not want not I always say) these cake truffles are little mini taste explosions. The best thing about them is that you can freeze them and they take 10 minutes to defrost quickly before friends come round. I have a freezer full of different flavours but nobody come round – hmmm I guess I will have to eat them then!

If the World ends tomorrow – why I would grab a Cake Truffle…

So if I have not convinced you yet to have a go at cake truffles then these are my parting words on the matter. If the world was about to end in true amarageddon fashion and you could grab one last thing from the fridge to eat before you go. Imagine you look inside the fridge and see it’s a toss-up between a swash buckling pirate cake pop and a double chocolate fudge cake truffle. I’d take the chocolate fudge truffle – hands down, no contest. In fact I’d go as far as to say it’s a real no brainer! I would rather my last mortal seconds end on Earth with sweet chocolate heaven exploding in my mouth and guilty smears across my face ready to meet my maker. Lets just hope my maker brings wet wipes…

Try a recipe for vanilla and fudge truffles dipped in white chocolate.

Vanilla Fudge

Ultimate Sticky Toffee Cake Pops / Truffles (caramel centre)

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Jacqueline Jay

Sticky toffee cake truffle heaven!

I have not blogged for so long as I have been tied up with marking and schoolwork (yawn!) then came the mad frenzy of summer holiday cleaning and decorating followed by you guessed it a spot of baking while my son is away on camp. This week I was asked to make cakes for my husbands work colleagues. It seems the husbands have been encouraging a bit of a bake off between wives. I resisted the competition as long as I could, grumbling as I went about how wrong it was for the men to be making their poor wives bake them cakes, sausage rolls etc – it’s not like we don’t all have enough to do!! But once I had chilled enough from work I set my sights high and made them sticky toffee cupcakes. Firstly to shut my husband up and secondly I had the express intention of baking enough sticky toffee cake to make some cake pops / truffles. Toffee and chocolate – oh how I love you.

Inspiration

I based these cake pops / truffles on my memory of sweet, sticky chocolate bars that when you bit into to you reached the caramel heaven centre and it dribbled unceremoniously down your chin (or is that just me?). This was the inspiration for my newest gourmet cake pop / truffle and just for the hell of it why not use both a milk and white chocolate as I am fairy indecisive you know! But the main aim was to get the chin dribbling sauce in the centre of the cake pop with no special tools. Challenge on!

1. Bake a sticky toffee cake (try this good recipe)

2. Follow the insturctions for rolling cake pops / truffles here

3. Make a buttercream and either add a caramel (ready made) sauce to it – to your taste or you could have a go at making a caramel from scratch

To add a caramel centre

4. Before you add a filling – take off a pinch of cake batter from the ball before you roll it (this will be used later – flatten it to about 1.5 cm round – see picture below and put to one side) To add a caramel filling to the cake truffles. You can use a shop brought toffee / caramel sauce or you can make your own caramel from scratch. I did try the latter but this will need some perfecting!

5. I didn’t have any special tools or filling instruments that I know you can get for cakes. To get the filling into the truffle push a lollipop stick halfway into the ball and then move it in a circular motion to make the hole bigger. Pour a little bit of sauce in to fill the hole almost up to the top as you can see in the picture below.

Filling the cake truffle with toffee sauce

6. To seal the sauce in take your extra piece of the cake mixture that you set aside in step 6 (see this next to the lollipop stick). Stick the extra piece of mixture over the top of the hole. Roll the ball gently between your hands – this will seal the sauce in – if you find you get a little more oozing out – just add-on an other small piece. Voila – toffee centre cake pop / truffles!

: Sticky toffee cake truffles ready to go

7. Once you have done this for as many of the cake truffles as you want filled then – pop them in the freezer until you are ready to dip them. Instructions for this will be shown at a later date. I always freeze my cake balls and then transfer them from freezer to fridge when I want to use them. Leave them for at least 15 mins to start defrosting before dipping. I don;t let mine fully defrost as I find that they become a little slippery and you risk getting pieces of mixture in the chocolate.

: Dipped sticky tofee cake truffles

8. This is what they looked like dipped. Stay tuned for more instructions. Yummy – I even tried double dipping – which is half milk chocolate and half white chocolate perfect for those situations when you can not decide which to dip it in!

Ultimate Sticky Toffee Cake Pops / Truffles (caramel centre)

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Jacqueline Jay

Sticky toffee cake truffle heaven!

Inspiration

1. Bake a sticky toffee cake (try this good recipe)

2. Follow the insturctions for rolling cake pops / truffles here

3. Make a buttercream and either add a caramel (ready made) sauce to it – to your taste or you could have a go at making a caramel from scratch

To add a caramel centre

Filling the cake truffle with toffee sauce

: Sticky toffee cake truffles ready to go

: Dipped sticky tofee cake truffles

Cake boules

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Jacqueline Jay

My Son and I have set ourselves a mission to have a baking competition this June half term holiday from School. So far we have created a test batch and they were not bad at all – quite a success for a first try! Now we are getting serious and have tried a few different flavours in order to see who will be crowned King or Queen of our newly named cake boules. Tiny bite size pieces of cake truffle dipped in chocolate and decorated. As we speak the boules are in the freezer waiting now for dipping and decorating in the final stage of this competition. We have also made some special wheat / gluten-free cake for those we know who can not eat normal cakes but still like a treat. We have decided to try some different flavour combinations and rather than fun pops we have decided we want to go more for a truffle, sophisticated look. Funnily enough we seem to be be very popular with peple wanting to be the chief testers – but those roles have been filled! Once we see the reaction we get, we will post more information about them. This weeks competition flavours are:

Birthday Boule – Madagascan vanilla soaked cake with fresh buttercream centre dipped in white chocolate with white sugar crystals.

Fudge Boule– Madagascan vanilla soaked cake with fresh buttercream centre filled with tiny squares of creamy fudge dipped in milk chocolate topped with fudge pieces .

Lemony Lush Boule – Lemon drizzle cake with fresh lemon buttercream dipped in white or milk chocolate and drizzled with chocolate and sprinkles (this was our test batch).

Toffee Heaven Boule– Rich dark chocolate cake with a chocolate fudge frosting mixed with speckles of toffee and smashed pieces of toffee dipped in milk chocolate topped with toffee shards.

Chocolate Crunch Boule – Rich dark chocolate cake with a chocolate fudge frosting mixed with tiny pieces of biscuit in the centre dipped in milk chocolate and coated with biscuit crumbs.

Vanoffee Boule – Madagascan vanilla soaked cake with fresh buttercream centre filled with speckles and chunks of toffee dipped in white chocolate and topped with toffee shards.

So we manged to get quite a few combinations for this competition (would not have happened in a normal week) – the kitchen has smelt like cake all week.