Cheesecake Pops Guarantee Business

I made about 80 cheesecake pops out of a whole vanilla bean cheesecake. Just to refresh your memory---a cheesecake pop is a bite size piece of cheesecake stuck on a lollipop stick and dipped in chocolate. I also made a very large pan of key lime pie filling (with no crust) and scooped out (with a melon baller) bite size balls to puncture with a stick as well. I then froze these pops so that my coworkers could hand them out to people without them melting or falling off the stick. Shawna and Jessica stood on the street corners and would hand a flyer and cheesecake pop to the stalled cars waiting on the red light. SMART! Turns out, yesterday we had 5 people come into eat at the restaurant based solely on trying a cheesecake pop! Jess and Shawna handed out my pops to nearby car dealerships and they love them as well!

Cheesecake and key lime pops are no joke--- they take a lot of time to prepare and a lot of patience. The key lime pops were the hardest to make. The key lime ball would melt quickly and rotate around the lollipop stick as I was trying to dip it in chocolate. Messy!

I think there is a market for such pops at events and festivals. For instance---the balloon classic (hot air balloon festival) is coming to COS later this year. To sell a cheesecake pop for $0.50 each would mean that I would be making about $40.00 per cheesecake, which would be almost three times as much as it costs to make a cheesecake. Then again---one must take into account the time to dip and prepare each cheesecake pop. Even selling a cheesecake pop at $0.25 a shot would make a profit, but that's almost too cheap to account for the time and energy of making those little guys.

Today I made two vanilla bean cheesecakes. I'm a little gun shy making my cheesecakes now. This oven at work seems finicky and I just haven't gotten the hang of it. When I bake my cakes I bake them two at a time, on top of a large large sheet pan, and with a pan full of water between the cakes. I bake them at 320 for a good hour and then leave them in the oven to continue baking and cooling. At least they didn't crack today! YAY!

By the way--- I bought some vanilla bean paste and it's fantastic! There are about 15 vanilla beans inside the jar mixed with a syrup--- it's so much easier than scraping vanilla beans. The taste is still great.