Italiano With Jodina

Recently, in honor of World Nutella Day… Giada Antonucci (friend, Italian student, and baking-partner-in-crime) and I got together to concoct a recipe that I dreamt up using Nutella (that most delicious, creamy chocolate & hazlenut Italian spread).

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Annual World Nutella Day was just around the corner, and I got to thinking that rather than just celebrate it by merely dipping my spoon into the nearest Nutella jar (as I’d done when I discovered this day last year), I, too, wanted to participate in the Nutella recipe challenge.

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Next came the question: What to do, what to make? And so the recipe came to me:  Nutella-filled Red Velvet Cake Pops… I’d sampled cake pops only once, but never made them…  and thus began the baking shenanigans — If there was a mistake to be made, we made it — truly worthy of a Lucy & Ethel episode!

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So, first, the disclaimer:  Try this at home at your own risk, and you may very well end up with a messy kitchen and completely blowing your diet, but very happy taste buds!

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First thing, we had to procure the cake pop molds (we found ours at Bed Bath & Beyond), then get savvy on how to mix the perfect cake pop batter (an extra egg added to the standard cake mix; substitute milk for water, cutting the amount in half, and add one packet of dry pudding mix, in a complimentary flavor (to our red velvet cake mix we added chocolate pudding).

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Then be sure to spray the cake pop molds with a spray that contains flour (not just any old vegetable spray, as it will mess up the consistency of the pops). We used Baker’s Joy.

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Next challenge:  Spoon the mixture into the mold — no pouring possible — the stuff is just too thick! (Of course, starting with this phase, we made pretty much every possible mistake we could: First off we deposited our batter, forgetting to spray. Do over! Note to selves: Cake pop molds are a pain in the beep to wash 🙁

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Once done, you clamp the two halves of the mold together and pop into the oven for the suggested baking time. Naturally, we overfilled our first batch. Luckily, cake pop molds are built with an overflow hole for just this type of snafu. An easy fix: just scrape off the excess after baking… providing us with perfect mini samples — we were able to instantly confirm (via scientific dipping method) that red velvet cake + Nutella = yummmm!

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Despite the late hour (Friday evening, after a long day and an even longer work week) we knew instantly that we were on to something good.

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Now with our cake pop baking techniques down pat, we moved on to our next challenge:  Getting the Nutella into the center of the cake pops. To say it was a challenge is an understatement. Cake pops are tiny little deals, and even if we’d had a pastry sleeve, which we didn’t, it still would have been una faccenda difficile (a difficult feat).

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After trying to use a paper envelope and then a plastic baggie (both unsuccessful), we finally ended up using a mini syringe filled (with sufficient difficulty, given the small aperture involved and the inherent thickness of Nutella… a bigger syringe would be much easier to wield). In our particular case, were able to inject 20-30 mm of Nutella into each cake pop.

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Next phase/Challenge:  Getting the sticks into the pops. We used a combination of the sticks included in the cake pop kit and bamboo skewers cut in half. We dipped them into melted chocolate and then stuck them into one side of the cake pop spheres. Then we popped them into the freezer for for about 10 minutes fast ‘curing’.

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Next, the final phase: Covering the pops with frosting/glacé. We wanted to use a vanilla or white chocolate frosting, but after messing those up (wrong melting techniques, etc), our potential frosting ingredients had dwindled down to a bag of Nestle chocolate chips, which we melted in the microwave, adding, per package instructions, a tablespoon of vegetable oil.

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But this was not the easy-peasy dipping sauce we’d hoped for. We ended up having to be very hands-on — basically frosting individually each cake pop versus dipping it(!)

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Mamma mia! What an arduous task! Four-plus hours after we’d started, at midnight, (and with the aid of a nice bottle of Italian red — we found San Giovese goes well with red velvet cake and Nutella ;-)) — we had finished with a yield of about 50 cake pops.

Whew!!! The result, despite our Lucy & Ethel-esque baking escapade, was delicious, as verified by our enthusiastic taste-testers the next morning at the Saturday Italian Conversation & Study Group!

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Afterthoughts:  If you want to try a similar omaggio (homage) to Nutella, go for it. If you avoid our first-timer mistakes, it should be a much quicker process. Should you want the same yummy flavors without the detailed work necessary to make cake pops, we suggest you make a simple red velvet cake and frost it with Nutella — same flavors and way less work!

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Your thoughts:  Have you tried Nutella? Have you used it in any baking recipes? Plan to try your hand at our crazy Red Velvet Nutella-filled Cake Pops? Love to hear your comments in the “Leave a Reply” section below… Buon  appetito!