Bruiser's Soccer Treats

It's been forever since I've posted and unfortunately almost as long since I've crafted. It seems now, the only time I can get my creativity on is when a friend or family member has a project for me to help with. This past weekend, I helped my neighbor and good friend Margie, with an end of season treat for her Daughter's soccer team. I received a Babycakes cake pop maker from a crafting friend (thanks Amy!), so my neighbor and I had ours working side by side and we turned out over 50 cake pops!

Wait, that sounded way easier than it actually was. Through trial and error, we probably made over 100 pops (some didn't even make them properly out of the pop maker), of those, 56 made it into the buckets. Luckily our Husbands were willing guinea pigs and welcoming recipients of the "rejects". First we needed a recipe for the balls. We had read that the denser the cake, the better the pop, so we went with our tried and true White Almond Sour Cream Cake recipe. Our first tip with using the pop maker. Don't use Crisco to grease the pop maker, spray with Pam! We wasted 2 batches until we figured that out! We used a pastry bag with a Wilton's 2D tip to fill the pop maker.

We fully filled the bottom cavity. This will create the roundest pop (you'll have some that will come out looking like Saturn, but don't fret. Once you dip it in chocolate, you won't see the ring. If you're really worried about the ring, you can break it off pretty easily.)

We found that baking them for 5 minutes was the perfect time. You'll have to experiment with times based on your maker and the recipe used. When they are done baking you need to put them in the freezer until they are ready to be dipped. Our first batch, we used chocolate morsels thinned with Crisco and a crock pot. We found the chocolate to cake ratio to be too heavy on the chocolate side (according to Hubby, though. you can never have too much chocolate!). So those hit the reject pile. We weren't too keen on the taste of the Candy Melts but we gave in and found that they worked the best. Make sure you melt the chips in a vessel deep enough to fully submerge the pop into the chocolate. Again, through trial and error, we found the best method for dipping is to first dip your lollipop stick in the candy melt and immediately poke it into the pop. Fully submerge your pop in the chocolate making sure to coat a small portion of the stick to ensure that your pop stays put! Next, you're going to swirl and tap your pop to get rid of the excess chocolate and ensure a nice round shape. Immediately dip or sprinkle your pop with colored sugars on nonpareil's and let dry on a cake pop stand or we used a piece of styrofoam covered in aluminum foil.

My friend bought the galvanized buckets in the Dollar section of our local Target. We decorated them with vinyl diecuts that we cut on the Cricut. The soccer ball is from Sports Mania cut at 2 inches. The font is Don Juan cut at 1 1/2 inches.

Once the pops are dry (we waited about 30 minutes) we wrapped them in Wilton's Pop Favor Bags. We took the styrofoam circles that we used to dry the pops on and cut them to fit snugly into the bottom of each pail. We carefully pushed the pops into the styrofoam and filled the buckets with green shredded paper and added chocolate soccer balls that were purchased from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

Here's the finished project! I hear the girls were thrilled with their treats....it made it worth all of the hard work! GO BRUISER'S!!!!!