Basketball Cake Pops

I'm back!! We had a great vacation... we spent the past week snowboarding in Snowshoe, West Virginia. Yep, you read it right. I went snowboarding! Anyone who knows me well, knows that I'm not an overly adventurous person. When we originally booked the trip I was signed up for skiing, but my husband is a snowboarder... so a few days before we headed north, he switched my rentals and lessons to snowboarding. My initial reaction was Is he insane?! But I went along with it and had a blast! I was pretty awful at first. I took a few brutal falls. But it was awesome! :)

What does snowboarding have to do with these cake pops? Well, we stopped at Starbucks on our way home to stretch our legs and refuel on caffeine. To my surprise, Starbucks is now selling cake pops and whoopie pies. I don't know that I will ever bring myself to buy them (since I make my own quite frequently), but they had a promotion where we got a free one with the purchase of a drink. I chose a cake pop for my freebie, and I was instantly craving more after eating it! So, I decided to whip up a batch this weekend. Since St. Patrick's Day is this week, I wanted to decorate them with green. But this week is also the beginning of March Madness (which I'm very excited about!) so I had to throw in a few basketballs too. Not that you should need a reason to make cake pops, but just in case... I've given you two. :)

I posted a pretty detailed "how to" when I blogged about my holiday cake pops, so if you've never made cake pops you may want to start there. You can obviously make whichever cake and frosting flavors you like... I went with a butter cake and cream cheese frosting for this batch. For the St. Patty's Day pops, I used green and white candy melts and green sprinkles. For the basketball pops, I tinted half of the melted white candy with an orange (oil based) candy coloring. After dipping the pops, once the orange candy had set, I melted dark chocolate for the basketball lines and used a candy squeeze bottle to draw them on.

Now you'll have to excuse me, I have a cake pop screaming my name! :)