If you've never made chocolate cake pops before thinking it looked just too fiddly, think again! This tutorial makes the tasks into a breeze. The cake pops are made from chocolate sponge, mixed with chocolate frosting, rolled into balls and coated in candy melts with an optional halo of sprinkles.
Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat together.
Add the eggs and vanilla and beat again.
Add the flour, baking powder and cocoa and fold through.
Grease and line a cake tin and tin the batter into it, levelling off.
Bake for about 25 minutes until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Tip the cake onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Make the cake pops
Crumble the cake into a large bowl. Keep crumbling until it resembles crumbs.
Add about 3/4 of the frosting to the bowl and mix through. Mix until you can form the mixture into a ball in your hand, adding more frosting as necessary. You might not need it all.
Roll your cake mixture into 20 equally sized balls. Try to get them as round as you possibly can by cupping your palms and rolling the mixture between them. Place them on a tray as you go.
Dip the very end of each cake pop stick into the melted chocolate, then push each stick into one of the cake balls. The chocolate helps to hold the stick in the cake.
Put all of the cake pops into the refrigerator for 1-2 hours to get cold and firm up. If you like, you can leave them overnight and finish making your cake pops in the morning.
Decorate the cake pops
Melt your candy melts according to the packet directions as directed and put the sprinkles in a small bowl.
Take each cake pop in turn and dip them into the candy melts, gently coating on all sides. This can take a bit of practice to get right. Allow the pops to drip over the bowl - this will help avoid excess melts from dripping down the stick.
If you want to add sprinkles, hold the pop until the candy melts have just begun to set, then swish the pop in the sprinkles so that they stick to the candy.
Push each cake pop stick carefully into an upturned colander or box lid so that the pops stand up while they set.