Guinness Cake Pops

Guinness cake pops are the perfect St. Patrick’s Day cake pops, especially if you jazz them up festive decoration like glitter or green icing. Like with any cake pops, this recipe does take time, but it’s not too complicated. The end result is absolutely well worth it — prepare well and don’t rush!

Looking for a great dish to bring to a St. Patrick’s Day party? Try Irish Soda Bread or Caramelized Onion Dip.

What’s you’ll need

This is a multi-step process. So you’ll want to get organized early to ensure it goes smoothly. Start by gathering and sorting all your ingredients:

Guinness cake

• Guinness: You’re just using a cup and a half of Guinness, so you can crack a bottle or a can and have some left to sip on. For any parents asking, keep in mind that the Guinness is part of the cake batter and will cook off when you bake the chocolate Guinness cake. Aim to reduce the Guinness by several tablespoons.
• Flour: Sifted all-purpose flour
• Sour cream: Full or reduced fat will work fine.
• Unsalted butter: You don’t need to soften the butter for the cake portion because you’ll be melting it in the pan after reducing the Guinness.
• Eggs
• Unsweetened cocoa
• White sugar: Consider taking an extra step of grinding the sugar in a food processor to make is super fine.
• Vanilla
• Baking soda

Chocolate butter cream

• Unsalted butter: You will need to soften the butter for the chocolate butter cream.
• Confectioner’s (powdered) sugar
• Unsweetened cocoa
• Milk: (whole or heavy cream)
• Vanilla

White chocolate coating

• White chocolate melting chips: Vanilla flavored chocolate melting chips work wonderfully! You can also use standard white chocolate chips. Or, if you want a chocolate coating, you can simply replace it with dark or semi-sweet chocolate chips. Aim for high quality chocolate or melting chips.

Three Key Steps Before Making Guinness Cake Pops

Guinness cake

• Preheat oven to 400°.
• Add Guinness into a sauce pan, and reduce for at least 10 minutes by heating on medium high heat (without boiling). Add the butter and heat until the butter is melted.
• In one mixing bowl, whisk together the sour cream, vanilla and eggs. Add the Guinness and butter mixture and whisk together. These are your wet ingredients.
• In another mixing bowl, add flour, unsweetened cocoa, sugar, and baking soda and mix together. These are your dry ingredients. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and use a hand mixer to blender to combine.
• Pour the batter into a buttered or greased 9-inch spring form lined with parchment paper. Bake for about 45 minutes to 1 hour until you can insert a toothpick and withdraw it with no batter on it.

Chocolate butter cream

• Use a hand mixer or blender to cream the softened butter. Slowly add the other ingredients to combine thoroughly with the mixer. It may take a couple minutes for the ingredients to combine into an icing texture. Add more milk, a small bit at a time, if needed to moisten the icing.

White chocolate coating

Melt the white chocolate chips according to the instructions. One way is to melt them for 30-second increments in the microwave and stir. You can also use a double boiler to slowly melt the chips. Just avoid heating them directly in the sauce pan. You can add a very small amount of Crisco to thin the white chocolate coating.

How to Make the Cake Pops

Remove any stiff crust of the cake after it has baked. Crumble the Guinness cake into a large bowl. Make sure you crumble all the larger chunks into small bits. Add about ½ cup of icing and mix gently and thoroughly into the crumbs. Continue to add icing and mix until the crumbs are just coated and the mixture is slightly like wet sand. Be careful not to add too much icing. The amount of icing this recipe makes should be about right.

Roll balls of the mixture of about 2 tablespoons. The exact size doesn’t matter, but aim to make the balls the same size. Place the balls on a baking pan and chill for at least 10 minutes. Then, roll the balls once more to make them more round.

With freshly melted white chocolate, dip one end of the lollipop stick in to coat the end, then stick into the balls about halfway. Repeat for each ball.

Next, it’s time to start dipping your St. Patrick’s Day cake pops into the coating. If the white chocolate has begun to harden, simply reheat it. Then dip each ball into it and place upright in a Styrofoam or cardboard and allow them to dry. Keep the Guinness Cake Balls in the refrigerator to chill until you’re ready to serve, up to four days. (Do not freeze them because they could crack!)

Note: You can add food coloring to the white chocolate coating or decorate your cake pops with sprinkles or edible glitter. (For example, for St. Patrick’s Day, we used green food coloring.) You could also use drizzles of melted chocolate in another color as decoration.

Guinness cake pops take time to make. If you’re looking for faster crowd-pleasing sweet bite, try White Chocolate Caramel Fudge or Coconut-Coated Chocolate Strawberries.