Sunday, August 15, 2010

Cake Balls!

Bakerella. I follow this amazing woman's blog, and let me tell you, if I had half her talent, I'd already own my own bakery and be rolling in dough. Literally. She is amazing- I wish I could make everything she has ever posted, but alas, I have neither the time nor the money for supplies. So I settle for drooling over every post.

A couple of months ago, my mother sent me a link to her recipe for cake balls- crumbled cake, mixed with frosting and rolled into balls and then covered in chocolate. They took a long time for me to make the first time, but I can tell you- they were the biggest hit with my friends and family. I'm very fond of making them, because they're amazingly delicious and everyone seems to get really excited when I say that I'm making them. Well, when my SIL Rachelle, my brother, Cody and I all went to see "Despicable Me" a couple of weeks ago, I saw the minions and I was instantly swept into cooking la-la land- I could make minions out of the cake ball recipe. It was my best idea yet! So here you have it. Cake balls slash cake ball minions.

P.S. I highly recommend seeing the movie. I could NOT stop laughing!



Cake Balls and Cake Ball Minions

The recipe is pretty simple. All you need is cake, frosting, and cooking chocolate. 
Bake the cake however you desire- chocolate is really really delicious, but my friends have recently said white cake tastes amazing with the chocolate coating. It's all up to you! 

I forgot to take a picture of the baked cake. But hopefully you all know what one looks like.

After you've baked it, crumble it all into a large bowl. I've found breaking off pieces of the cake and crumbling it in portions is easier than trying to do the whole thing. Get it good and crumbly. Then scoop out a whole can of frosting and plop in on top.


This part tends to get a little messy- you have to mix the crumbled cake with the frosting. You can do it with a spoon, but it's so much easier to just get your hands in there and mix it up. And besides, what's cooking without getting a little messy anyway?


Now that it's all mixed up, take little chunks (no larger than an inch in diameter, or it gets hard to cover it in chocolate all the way) and roll them into balls using the palm of your hands. Make sure to wash your hands in between mixing and rolling, because if you roll while your hands are still all sticky from mixing, the balls tend to be a little less solid and more sticky. If you're making pops, or minions like myself, I rolled them into oval-ly ball things and stuck baking sticks in them. I have no idea how to describe it.





Now, at this point I like to refrigerate the pops for a couple of hours. That way they're more solid and less likely to crumble in the chocolate when they're coated. They're just easier to work with that way. And I like easier to work with.


After they've been chilled for a little while, take them out and melt the chocolate. I usually use an entire bag of candy melts, and that's usually enough to fully cover all of the cake bites. 










Just plop the ball in the chocolate, use the spoon to cover it fully, then pick it up with the spoon, tap the side the pan to get some of the excess chocolate off of it, and then plop it down on the pan!

For the minions, I did the same thing, but I put the ends of the sticks into a colander so that the bottom of their chocolate bodies wouldn't be flat. Even though some of them still ended up that way.

Then you let the cake bites cool off, put them in the fridge to chill, and vwalah! You have amazingly delicious cake balls.













1 comments:

Mama Steele on August 15, 2010 at 7:48 PM said...

Vwahlah is actually spelled "voila" which is French and I know this because I took French for 6 years in junior high and high school. Just sayin...
And the cake balls are pretty amazing. So glad I sent you that link!

 

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