Phantom Gourmet: Cake Pops Boston
DORCHESTER - Bite-sized and beautiful, indulgently rich, and almost too cute to eat. At a brand new confectionary boutique in Lower Mills, Dorchester, Heather O'Donnell has created the state's only bakery specializing exclusively in cake pops.
"They are fun. They are cute. They are not too much. They are not too little. They are portable. They are tidy, and most of all, they are delicious," she said.
"There is a lot of individual vendors, but there's no cake pop shop," Heather added. "When you walk in here and you look at our case, you're not gonna see the same thing that you see in every bakery's case."
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"What I love about this is that, people come in here and they buy cake pops for happy occasions, or they buy them to eat them because it makes them happy, and they love it."
So what exactly is a cake pop?
"Contrary to what people think is a baked cake on a stick, it's actually a confection that has a truffle-like consistency; that's made out of finely crumbed cake with butter cream mixed in; that's kneaded into a soft dough; that is then rolled, and we put in a stick, and we dip it in chocolate and other candy coatings," Heather explained.
Cake Pops Boston offers about 15 rotating flavors, and six standard ones, like Vanilla, Salted Caramel, Red Velvet, and of course, Chocolate.
"Basically, it's a Triple Chocolate. It would definitely be in the decadent column. It's chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, but very smooth," she said. "If you're a chocolate lover, it is for you."
If for some strange reason you're not a chocolate lover, there are still all kinds of options, like Coffee Cake or Key Lime Pie.
"What I have discovered, particularly since opening the shop, is that there is a huge number of people that actually don't like chocolate," Heather said. "We really had to balance out our flavor selections to include sweet cream, and confetti, and Meyer lemon for the non-chocolate lovers."
Making great cake pops isn't easy. It's a multi-step process that's all done by hand, all from scratch. Few flavors are more labor intensive, or more delicious, than S'mores.
"We bake a graham cake and we put it in the food processor, and we grind it to a very fine crumb. Then we mix that with marshmallow buttercream, and we smash it together to make this dough," she explained. "Then we take small dollops of Fluff and pack the dough around the marshmallow. And then we chill them again so that everything maintains its shape. We dip them in melted chocolate, and we let them dry, and then we will drizzle them with a marshmallow drizzle and a little more graham cracker on the outside."
While most of the cake pops are formed into a ball, that's not the only shape they can make.
"We have ladybugs and we have bees. We do all sorts of animals and objects, and anything that people desire," Heather said. "We live in an age where people eat with their eyes, and for a lot of people the visual is the most important factor. So in order to keep it interesting, we always try to have something new and different in the case."
You can find Cake Pops Boston at 2267 Dorchester Ave in Dorchester, and online at cakepopsboston.com.
Watch Phantom Gourmet on Saturdays and Sundays at 10:30 and 11 a.m. on myTV38.