Recipe: Raspberry Martini Cake Pops

Another short recipe based on My Little Cupcake that can be found here. 

(Image from http://www.mylittlecupcakeblog.com)

This is a little recipe that replaces the ‘frosting’ aspect of the traditional cake pop dough for some alcoholic goodness and chocolate! It’s a great example of how creative you can be when it comes to cake pops, and focuses on raspberry and chocolate in particular. You can experiment yourself with all kinds of combinations if you can mix in some flavoured alcohol such as vodka with syrup, fruit or otherwise.  There are all kinds of flavoured liqueurs and all kinds of places to get them. I personally picked up a couple of teeny flavoured bottles from this company - http://www.getintothehabit.co.uk/products.html

For the Cake Pop Dough:

• Chocolate Sponge Cake (already made for crumbling)
• 3/4 Cups of Milk Chocolate Couverture
• 3/4 Cups (or 175ml) of Single Cream
• 120ml Raspberry Vodka
• 1/4 Cups (or 60ml) Raspberry Syrup (or strained syrup from thawing frozen Rasbperries)

For the rest:

• Cake Pop Moulds
• Extra Milk Chocolate Couverture
• Lollipop Sticks
• Decorations

First things first, crumble up the chocolate sponge cake. This is the first step for a lot of cake pops, and if you don’t have one handy, then you will need to go get one or bake one. You can get a lot of recipes for a simple chocolate sponge, but here’s a basic one (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/chocolate_cake_48307) if you need it:

• 50g Cocoa Powder
• 175g Self-Raising Flour
• 1 tsp Baking Powder
• 100g Soft Butter
• 300g Caster Sugar
• 3 Eggs
• 4 tbsp Milk
• Baking Tin

Chocolate Sponge Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4. Mix the Cocoa Powder with about 100ml of boiling water (about 6 tbsp) into a large bowl and mix well, and then add in all the other ingredients and combine. It should take 25-30mins to bake. You will want to wait for it to cool completely before crumbling.

Making the Pops:

Once crumbled, melt the couverture (You can melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of boiling water) into the single cream, and then simply mix that into the crumbled cake, and then the rest of the dough ingredients. You may need to experiment until you get the right texture to make into dough. You can then use your cake pop moulds to create the shapes you want, adding cocoa powder to the moulds to help remove the dough after shaping.

You can now melt either more couverture or cake pop melts to coat the pops with (and dip the lollipop sticks into to attach to the cake pops) and proceed with decorations. The original recipe uses a mix of chocolate and white cake pop melts, and decorates with a bit more of the melted chocolate along with some M&Ms, but it’s completely up to you!

Many different pops could be created using decorations or additions that either add to the chocolate or relate to the flavour of the syrup and alcohol put into the pops. For instance a strawberry chocolate cake pop infused with strawberry vodka and syrup, decorated with strawberry pearls, or go full out chocolate with chocolate syrup, chocolate vodka and some polished chocolate nuggets! Just make sure you don’t eat too many at once!

You can get a range of products to help you with this recipe on our website, and for a video instruction of how to create basic Cake Pops you can watch our video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFe_hiqKl_Y to help you with various parts of the process.