Young Chef Sunday – Oreo cupcake pops

When it’s …um…hot? outside, you don’t really want to turn on the oven. Today’s Young Chef Sunday is a perfect solution to satisfying the need to bake on a warm summer day. We made no-bake Oreo cupcake pops, recipe courtesy of MyLittleCupcakePop.com. The premise is simple. We all love the idea of the amazing cake pops that people like Bakerella make (haven’t seen her site? You HAVE to check it out! She’s PHENOMENAL!) However, there are those days…(say, hypothetically, after taking four children to the coast for a dance competition and stuffing 6 people into a hotel room with two queen beds) when you just don’t think you can muster up the intestinal fortitude that would be required to bake something adorable like that without risking tearing off the darling little head of the precious girl who behaved so beautifully at said beach and performed beautifully in her competition. Sooooo we go the easy route.

Basically, to make these pops, all you need is a 16 oz package of sandwich cookies (you know the kind – chocolate on the outside, white cream inside, deliciousness all around), a couple of bags of candy melts, and an eight-ounce package of cream cheese – do NOT go light on this. It doesn’t have the firmness to hold together the way that fatty version will. Put the Oreos (or whatever kind of sandwich cookie you may have chosen) in your food processor. Don’t worry; if you don’t have one, you can simply smash the cookies in a Ziploc bag – gets the aggression out…

Once the cookies are smashed to powder, hand mix them with the cream cheese. In one recipe, the recommended amount of cream cheese is eight ounces; in another, it’s seven. I would recommend trying seven, as our pops seemed a little loose once complete.

After mixing, take the dough into 1 1/2″ balls (or so – I’m terrible with sizes) and smooth them into the fabulous little molds pictured above. (want to know where to purchase? Check here…)

Remove each pop and set them on a platter, plate, or tray to chill. As soon as possible, get the pops into the fridge. They NEED to be chilled in order to achieve the best appearance (if you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that I believe my own mistakes to be the best form of education, as well as a source of great amusement…I speak from experience here!)

After they’ve chilled for two to three hours, you can dip the pops into candy melts. In general there are a couple of things to note about melting the candy: 1. Don’t get it too hot (it scalds and gets lumpy and you’re up a creek…again, from experience…) 2. Don’t leave it too cool (it’s thick and pulls your cupcake pops apart and looks bad but then you have to eat the destroyed cupcake pop before anyone sees your mist– just don’t do it.) One trick is to add a little bit of Crisco to the melts when they’re getting melty. Then, they’ll cling nicely too all the nooks and crannies of your pop.

Dip the top first, then the bottom…THEN you can stick the sticks in the bottom and prepare to decorate.

As you can see, white chocolate with the multicolored specks got too hot. We placed M&Ms on top, purchased from the fabulous Wall of M&Ms in New York City. Once the pops were finished, we put them BACK in the fridge – better safe than sorry – then eventually put them into bags so we could deliver them to friends rather than keeping them in our house and risking eating way too many of them…oops. Too late.

We put them into a vase and delivered them as a cupcake pop bouquet.

Lastly, one REALLY important factor. The wonderful woman behind the cupcake pop mold has not only posted a variety of other recipes on her blog as well as helpful hints and techniques. Definitely worth perusing!) She’s even included an actual pop that requires baking. You know, for when the weather comes back down from these balmy 79-degree days.

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A complimentary product/service was provided for this review. However, all opinions expressed are our own.  We were not compensated in any other way.  See Entertaining Morsels Disclosure Policy for more details.