Elmo cake pops - step by step!

This is the post you've been waiting for :)


Elmo cake pops for the birthday girl on Friday. It was my biggest food project ever.  Took hours and hours.

I followed instructions from Bakerella carefully.  She knows what she's talking about.  Do not veer off from her method.

Supplies needed:
candy melts
cake mix
frosting
lollipop sticks
candy eyes
candy for noses

If you've never made cake pops or cake balls before (I hadn't) I suggest reading her post on the original cake pops.

I used a yellow cake mix and white frosting. 

Crumble the cake completely.  Mix in a can of frosting.  Mine seemed quite wet.  I kept out a few tablespoons of the frosting and I'm glad I did so.

Roll into balls; chill.  You can use fridge or freezer, but don't freeze more than about 15 min.  If you do, they will expand as they thaw and crack your candy coating.  Been there, done that.

Dip tips of sticks into melted candy melts and then into chilled balls.  Chill again briefly. 

(Sorry, some of these are yucky cell phone pics)
Coat heads in the melted chocolate, and apply eyes and mouth while wet.  You don't have much time.

Add nose and extra chocolate to make 'fur'.  The nose was a bit of conundrum for me.  I tried three options.  Here you see the tic tac.  Overall it was the best option.  The color was right and it didn't weigh much.  It bothered me that it looked rectangular, but it was okay.

Jelly bean option (this is what Bakerella used and I don't like it)

My FAVORITE - the runt nose.  SO realistic.  Unfortunately very heavy.  I tried four and two cracked right away.  In order to secure it well enough you need to press in really hard and that compromises the structure of the cake.

Isn't he CUTE?!

Love him.

But, alas, most ended up with tic tacs.  It's all good.

And I ended up doing party pops with sprinkles with the remaining balls.  One cake mix gave me 48 balls, I had 35 sticks, and only 28 pairs of eyes.  So I got creative at the end.

All in all, it was very rewarding, albeit HARD.  Especially when Rosebud said "ELMO!" as I showed her one.  Yep, totally worth it.