To Cake Pop or Not To Cake Pop....

Waaaaay back when I first entered this wild & crazy food business, I started my career in fine dining. First plating desserts, then assisting in making basic doughs & batters, then onto plate design and menu planning, and eventually running a whole department of bakers, platers and pastry cooks. It's a bit of a different world than the cake business, but the fundamentals are the same - we make yummy things that people want to eat (hopefully).

Because of this background I sometimes look at things in the cake world a bit differently. 

The cake pop trend is something that I know people love. And I mean, why wouldn't you? It's a single portable serving of cake and frosting, coated in a candy shell. You can sculpt them, shape them, and finish them in lots of different colors & designs. For weddings I totally get why they've become a staple of the sweets buffet. And I'll let you in on a little secret. They started as a way for bakers & pastry chefs to turn cake scraps (or even stale cake) into something profitable. As a restaurant pastry chef I would often take the un-used portion of a whole cake that would have otherwise made it into the trash can, toss the whole thing into the mixer, mash it up and roll that into "cake truffles". 

To make them now, I would have to bake a fresh cake (from scratch like everything we do) and toss it into the mixer just to get mashed up. I've worked hard on my cake recipes. I've tweaked them and refined them so that the moisture levels, density and crumb are just right. And now you want me to squish it all up and roll it into a ball. Hmph.

And let's talk about cost too. Factoring the time to bake, smash, scoop, dip& decorate. Are cake pops really profitable for cake shops? 

I've gotten tons of requests for them and am seriously thinking about putting them into the line up, but what do you think? Should I jump on the cake ball train and just close my eyes every time I toss that perfectly baked cake into the mixer? Or should I stand by the slice?

What do you think?