Daring Bakers April Challenge - cheesecake pops

OK - I should be right up front and tell you that I have a love/hate relationship with this recipe. I love the cheesecake, and the flavors were delicious and the end result was cute as heck, and it was a very good challenge, but in terms of return on investment I don't think I would do it again, because they turned out to be hard to eat and overall they were cuter than they were good. And they didn't stay on the stick - this may well have been my fault for not dipping all the way up to the stick, but I had visions of people dropping cheesecake in their laps!

I made a half recipe of the cheesecake in a 7"x7" pan - I wanted it to be deep b ecause I wanted to cut them into squares instead of scooping then into balls. The baking time was a little longer, but it came out terrific. So far, I love it.




I chilled it overnight, then took it out of the pan in its little parchment paper sling - easy, everything is working great! Then I tried to cut it. Hmmm hmmm hmmmm. Not so good. No matter what I did, the cheesecake stuck to the knife in big chunks - slender knife, hot knife, it didn't matter. What a huge mess! I was hating it at this point. And no, I didn't have any plain dental floss to cut it with (only mint!), though that might have worked.







So, I put the lollipop sticks into the squares of cheesecake and jammed the whole mess into the freezer and waited until they were really frozen. Then found that I had to trim the frozen pops to get a nice smooth surface, but that worked great, really.



I started dipping in white chocolate - I had an idea to use colored sugar to decorate, to coordinate with the ribbons I was going to use. At this point I had a "what was I thinking" moment.


This was not as cute as I had hoped it would be --not nearly as cute as it was in my mind!!

But I decided to just keep on working - I wanted to use orange sugar, so I added some orange oil to the white chocolate so the pops would be like creamsicles (later note - this was a great idea and the orange oil made the white chocolate fantastic!!) But I still wasn't in love with how they looked.

Then, finally, epiphany! Some of the ribbon I had was white and dark brown, so I had the idea to make the pops geometric, with contrasting white and dark circles - I dipped them, then poured a bit of chocolate on some waxed paper and I used a decorating tip as a tiny cutter to make the dots. These were the best yet - I really liked how they looked, and of course the flavors were great. It was fun to do, even though it was frustrating at times. Looking forward to next month!!