Hello,

I am new at making cake pops and I had a question about what kind of coating to use for them?? How do you get the coating to be smooth?? Any tips, tricks, hints...

You can use any candy coating, Merckens, Wilton, Make and Mold, etc. If you need to make the coating thinner use Crisco. Add a tablespoon at a time to make it the thickness of cream. Dip cake pop and tap gently to get rid of excess coating. I hope this helps.

The easiest coating to use is melted candy melts (wiltons makes them) you can also use regular chocolate- but it should be tempered- which is time consuming, so I use the candy melts with a little flavoring extract added.
I've only made them a few times, but the best tricks I can give are these:
Bake pops
Get an empty egg carton, put a ball in each hole.
Melt chocolate - get your lollipop stick and poke a hole in the ball. Then dip your stick into the melted chocolate and insert it into the ball, when all sticks are in the pops- stick the whole carton in the freezer (for me that is outside!)
Once the chocolate hardens the ball is attached to the stick and shouldn't fall off. Then you can heat up chocolate again. Have your styrofoam ready to stick the pop into.
I just dip them gently- so they don't fall off stick, the roll it so the chocolate falls off evenly- don't tap against pan to get excess off, tap against your fingers- b/c if you tap too hard- you could lose your ball.

Then I stick them back in the freezer (chocolate hardens fast) Then I decorate them......which is the fun part!

I learned that if your balls aren't perfectly round- your cakepop will not be perfectly round! My previous pops all are lopsided- I was using the bake pop pan, I have ordered the babycake pan from kohl's, and can't wait to get it!

Happy Baking!!

Thank you both for the replies. I rolled them into balls myself, so I am sure that they were not perfectly round, but it just seemed like the coating wasn't my friend. I will try the Wilton Candy Melts this time and see how that goes. Thanks for the tips!!