Cake Balls

Leveling cakes or cakes that fall apart when removing from the pan because you ran out of baker's spray, usually leaves a lot of unusable, yet still edible cake. In an effort not to waste said cake, I decided to try making cake balls.

There are several different methods to making these little cakey bites. The first I'd heard of involved mixing crumbled cake with flavored, liquid, coffee creamer. The other was mixing the cake with cream cheese frosting. I decided to go with the creamer.

I bought a bottle of the Safeway-brand hazelnut flavored liquid coffee creamer. I crumbled leftover chocolate cake (two layers of a 6" cake) into my mixer and proceeded to pour in the creamer. Did I measure? No. Should I have? Dammit, yes. I poured in too much!

The mixture was supposed to be thick. Thick enough to mold into perfect little round balls. Well, I ended up with a not-so-thick blend that formed little masses you couldn't necessarily call balls. It was not fun to handle. In all, it was a mess. I continued nonetheless.

I lined my pans with parchment paper, placed my "not-so-balls" and stuck them in the freezer to set.

My plan was to then dip them in candy melts. This was a whole 'nother mess in itself. Having never really used candy melts, I wasn't too sure how to dip them to create this truffled-candy look. But, I used a double-boiler to melt them and thought I was good to go. It just got messier from there.

I clearly did not know what I was doing and I think I overmelted the melts, because it got thick and started to break up the not-so-balls. So, now my white chocolate melts have pieces of chocolate cake swimming in it. There's cake and chocolate everywhere.

All-in-all, I think I got half of my balls covered. And they weren't pretty or smooth. But they tasted good. This experiment is defintely worth another attempt. I also think I'll go with the cream cheese frosting. There's probably less room for error there.

My ugly balls.