Baking Cake Pops

Todd: So Meg, I hear that you’re quite the baker. You like to bake brownies, cookies, things like that.

Meg: Yeah. I love to bake. It’s pretty relaxing for me, and kind of fun, kind of a creative outlet, baking.

Todd: Well, everybody notices it in the office when we see you bringing brownies for your students, and we’re all jealous. We wish we were in your class. So what is it with baking? Like is it just something you do to relax?

Meg: Yeah. Well personally, I love sweets. Like I would eat only sweets if my body could handle it.

Todd: Right.

Meg: But I try to eat regular food, too. So I think I inherited that from my mom. So because I love sweet so much, it ends up being really fun making something like brownies or cookies.
And for the creative aspect, I love to make cupcakes or cakes and – I don’t know if you’ve heard of cake pops – and decorate them.

Todd: No. What’s a cake pop?

Meg: A cake pop is like a little piece of cake on a stick coated in chocolate.

Todd: Oh really? That sounds pretty good.

Meg: Yeah. So in America right now, they’re getting pretty popular. Some people are saying it’s the new cupcake. So I don’t know if you know, a few years back, cupcakes got pretty popular. And so now, we have cake pops.

And I was in the process of starting a little cake pop business before I moved to Japan. So, it’s really fun because you can make the cake pops, and it takes a while but then you can decorate them in all these really creative ways for different holidays or parties or birthday or just cute things, so. Yeah, so the creativity plus something sweet makes it fun for me.

Todd: That's awesome. But what – cake pop, is it like a corn dog but like a cake?

Meg: No. It’s just like a little round piece of cake. So the process is you should bake a cake like normal.

Todd: Yeah.

Meg: And then sift it up, so it’s just tiny little crumbs. So ruin the cake that you’ve made, sift it up until it’s just crumbs and then mix in just a little bit of like cream cheese frosting. And it makes kind of a formable, moldable dough. And then you mold balls, put it on a stick, dip it chocolate, and then you can decorate it.

So it can be chocolate or like a vanilla colored type, you know, you can have different colors, things like that.

Todd: Wow. Cake pops.

Meg: Yeah. Yeah. So cake pops are probably my favorite thing to make but also decorating cakes. I took a couple of cake decorating classes and making frosting and, you know, using the special frosting tools to swirl it on the cupcakes or whatever. So yeah.

Todd: So have you ever made like a wedding cake or anything like that?

Meg: I did actually make one wedding cake. I never really wanted to make wedding cakes because they’re very complicated and there’s so much pressure for it to be extremely perfect because it’s someone’s wedding.

Todd: Yeah.

Meg: And so – but there was a couple that I knew who were just doing really like low-budget cute wedding, and they weren’t too concerned about it being a huge cake. They just need something smaller.

And so, I did a couple of tiers and I was actually a chocolate cake. So it wasn’t even white. So I did one chocolate cake but I have a done cake pops for a few weddings as like favors for the guests.

Todd: Wow. The cake pops are just the thing.

Meg: Yeah, because they come out so cute. I actually have a cake pop set that I can make where it looks like a little bride and a little groom like a little tuxedo. And so those are probably my most popular ones for weddings.

And I also, before cake pops, I was making truffles. So that’s another thing that you can also decorate in a cute way.

Todd: Wow. Well, actually we’ll talk about that more in the next interview. I’d like to ask you some questions about truffles.

Meg: Sure.