Crazy Mommy Project

So, I found the time to make "Cakeballs" which from now on, I'm taking Katie's advice, and calling them Cake Truffles. They were pretty easy.

Here's what I did in a completely unorganized, poorly-described explanation...

I bought two boxes of Chocolate Fudge cake mix and one can (jar, container? what would you call it?) of vanilla icing, one of chocolate icing. The recipe says to use a food processor but I don't have one. So, I cooked all the cake as directed and used my hands to break it up into tiny pieces after it had cooled... although it totally wouldn't surprise anyone if I tried to do this with fresh-out-of-the-oven cake, would it? All I had to do was take broken up peices of cake and rub them between my hands and it made this fine cake powder - well not powder really, tiny bits (I should write a cookbook - my descriptions are fabulous). I did one box of cake mix with vanilla icing and the other with chocolate icing (the chocolate-chocolate combo is my fav by far). Using my hands, I made them into little 2inch-ish balls. Then I put them in the freezer for a couple of hours. This was by far the easy part. And, at this point, I was thinking - this is NOTHING, I can do this! Mistake.

I don't know why I thought coating them would be easy. Obviously I didn't think of the logistics of it all in my head when planning this out. I bought two packages of white chocolate chips, shortening, food colouring and sprinkles. I wanted to do a bunch of colours but realized that I didn't have enough chocolate chips so I went with green and red. I put a stainless steel bowl over a smaller sauce pot with boiling water in it and kept it over medium heat on the stove (I don't have a double boiler). First I added about 2 tbsp of shortening, maybe a little more, and then once that melted, I added one bag of chocolate chips, then the food colouring... make sure you stir soon as you add the chips so they don't burn.

Then came the part where I was like "What the heck do I do now?" - how the heck do I get these round truffles (:p), iced evenly and then back on the sheet without big finger marks in them? So, I stabbed them with a fork and dipped them in the coating chocolate, keeping one side icing-free and then carefully maneuvered them onto the baking sheet so the non-iced part was on the bottom. In order to make the sprinkles stick, I had to "sprinkle" every two-truffles or the icing would dry. I also kept a few white chocolate chips that I melted with almost equal amounts of shortening (so it's more watery) that I used to drizzle white chocolate on top of some of them for variety. Once I figured out the best way to ice them, it was pretty easy.

Anyways, I made them 4 days in advance and kept them in the freezer until we left for the party - when they were thawed they were super soft and I liked the denser consistency that they had when they were frozen.

Two boxes of cake mix made about 40 cakeballs but I think next time I'll make them smaller...

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