Golden Snitch Cake Pops

Harry Potter themed Golden Snitch Cake Pops! The potterhead in me jumping up and down in pure excitement!

As mentioned before, I love making party food fit into any theme. The theme can be as simple as a colour or a shape or as elaborate as the entire Harry Potter book collection with 2000+ pages filled with spells, magic and the many MANY new words and meanings that quickly became part of our English language. There are literally hundreds of themed foods that can be done with a theme like this including Honeydukes Sweetshop in Hogsmeade, polyjuice potion and lots more. I haven’t seen these Golden Snitch Cake Pops around before so we were really excited to come up with something new too. These cake pops fit so well into any potter party, and they are beautiful, a little different and so so yummy (not to forget the most important part of it!)

What do you need to make Golden Snitch Cake Pops:

Cake: After layering a cake and shaping it, I usually use the cut offs for the cake balls. If you don’t have a cake handy, any store-bought muffin (without the icing) or cake will also work. Just make sure it’s fresh and tasty as these Golden Snitches should be pretty to look at -but also tasty when eaten at the party.

Ganache: I make my own chocolate ganache by heating up 250ml of cream until it nearly boils. Then take it off the heat and add 300g of dark chocolate to it. Stir well and your ganache is ready. You can also use store-bought chocolate sauce. You just need a little to bind the cake together and keep it firm in a ball.

Lollipop sticks or paper straws: I usually use paper straws (and have done here too) as they are easy to work with, long enough for kids to hold and better for the environment. Lollipop sticks will work too though if you have them handy.

White chocolate: Use any brand that you would usually use. I have used the Morde brand but any brand that will melt well will do.

Yellow gel colour: The yellow colour will make it easier to colour the chocolate gold later. I love the magic gel colours. The colours are vibrant and you never need more than a few drops to get the colour you want. They also have gel colours especially designed to add to chocolate which is amazing as sometimes the chocolate will become stiff and un-usable after adding the food colour. It has happened once or twice to me too and it’s really quite annoying to see all that lovely chocolate go to waste.

Golden snitch wings: I printed the wings on a piece of 300gsm paper and cut them out. You can also just cut white craft paper into the shape of the wing. Make sure you leave a little extra paper at the end to push the wing into the cake pop. You can download the file to print here: Golden Snitch Cake Pop Wings.

Gold dust and brush: Use any gold dust for cake making. I have used this Magic Lustre Dust for some of the balls and this Sugarin Lustre Dust for the rest. You can see the difference between the colours in the photo of the three golden snitches on top. The one to the far right is darker because I used the Sugarin brand for that one.

My top tips for making Golden Snitch Cake Pops:

• Temper your chocolate by heating it in the microwave on defrost mode for a few minutes -it’s okay if there are still lumps. The colder lumps will mix with the warmer melted chocolate and while you stir the lumps out, you will temper your chocolate perfectly and you won’t need to set the chocolate in the fridge.
• Make sure you use a new brush for the gold dust -or one only used for food in the past.
• Let the cake pops set fully on the straw before dipping it in the chocolate
• Push the wings into the cake pop before the chocolate sets. I tried to make two at the same time, but quickly realized it was impossible because of the wings. While I inserted the wings into one cake pop the other became too hard and the wing would not go into it as easily without bending.
• Cake pops can crack if the temperature difference between the warm chocolate and the cold cake ball is too great. If you have let the cake pop cool in the fridge, bring it back to near room temperature before you cover it with the warm chocolate.
• These cake pops stay fresh as long as a cake would. I made these a few days before the party (as I had the actual Harry Potter cake to attend to the day before) and kept them in an airtight tupperware in the fridge until the time of the party.
• Be patient. They do take a little while to make. If you don’t have an entire afternoon in one go, you can do them in 4 stages:
  1. Make the cake balls and let them cool.
  2. Later you can insert the straws (with a little chocolate adhesive) and let those cool.
  3. Cover the cake pops with chocolate and insert the wings
  4. Paint the dust on the cake pops

Can kids make these alone?

As you know, I always encourage the kids to help out in the kitchen, but in my experience it’s not so easy for them to make these cake pops -maybe because the white chocolate is a little harder to work with than dark chocolate. My daughters all came to help but they were finding the dipping-and-twirling-while-tapping-the-wrist-action a bit challenging and their cake pops didn’t become fully round (not that I succeed on every try either, mind you) In the end they helped me colour all the chocolate with the gold dust. It was exactly the help I needed to finish 30 of these 🙂

See my video or follow the steps below. Hope you have an awesome Harry Potter party 🙂

Yield: The ingredients and measurements below in the ingredients list are for 5 Golden Snitch Cake Pops