Pot of Gold Cake Pops for Saint Patricks Day

Happy March!  Now that it is officially March, I can start thinking all things St Patrick’s Day!  And all things Spring, but that is WAY too much to ask here in Canada.  So I’ll stick to Leprechauns and Pot’s of Gold.  I think that every kid has once thought that if they could just get to the end of that rainbow, there would be a gleaming pot of gold at the end of it.  I’m still trying to find it, aren’t you?  I think I’ll have better odds if I take up playing the lottery.  Aren’t your odds of winning the lottery less than they are of being struck by lightning?  I guess that means that my odds of finding a pot of gold are even slimmer than the lottery.  Besides, playing the lottery is a lot less work!  It’s mountainous around these ‘ere parts.  It’s me and the lottery now.

Since now that I’ve given up trying to find the end of the rainbow, I’ll just have to stick with making a pot of gold!!  Making these cake pops is pretty standard, but with a little twist of putting them upside down, voila, you have the rim of the pot!!  Genius, I know.   Since it takes the royal icing rainbow so long to dry, you might want to start with those a day early.  If you can’t find black melting chocolate, you can also use brown.  I tried brown in my practice versions, and it looked great too!  Also, when it comes to the yellow sugar pearls, you can use any small round sprinkle/candy for the  “gold”, or even just regular yellow/gold sanding sugar. 

 Have fun, and good luck searching. 

I’m off to buy a lottery ticket. 

Pot of Gold Cake Pops

Ingredients:
cake crumbs
buttercream
cake pop sticks
black melting chocolate wafers (I use Merckens)
yellow melting chocolate wafers
yellow or gold sprinkles/nonpareils (I used yellow sugar pearls from Wilton)
Royal Icing coloured red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple with any small round tip. I used Wilton tips #2-#4.

Procedure:
Mix cake crumbs and buttercream until mixture is soft enough to roll into balls. It should be the consistency of playdough. Melt black chocolate. Dip cake pop stick about 1″ into chocolate, and insert into cake ball. Allow to harden by placing in the freezer for about 5-10 minutes. Once sticks are hardened into the cake balls, dip the cake pop into the black chocolate, covering the ball entirely. Allow excess chocolate to drip off and place, stick up, on a piece of parchment paper. A “foot” will form where the cake pop is sitting, and that will act as the rim around the pot.

To make the rainbow, pipe a small arc with the red royal icing onto parchment paper. Follow the arc on the inside with orange, then yellow, then green, then blue and finally purple. Allow to dry until completely hardened. This make take several hours, or overnight.

When rainbows and cake pops are hardened, melt the yellow melting chocolate in a piping bag and pipe a small amount of it in a line on top of the pot. Place the rainbow in the melted chocolate and hold in place until it can stand on it’s own. When the rainbow can stand up, pipe a small amount of yellow chocolate around the rainbow and cover the chocolate with the yellow sprinkles for the gold.