Cake Balls

I'm sure most of you have seen or heard about Cake Pops and Cake Balls. They are definitely a huge trend right now. I believe Bakerella started making these perfect bite size morsels and it was a truly Genius idea!!

The first time I made Cake Pops was around Christmas time. They are definitely labor intensive but in the end definitely worth it in my opinion!

This time I was making cake balls (same as cake pops but without the stick) for an order. One of the best part of making these is you get to totally cheat and use everything store bought!

I started with boxed yellow cake mix and baked up a 12inch round cake.



Once the cake is cooled completely I smash it to smithereens in a bowl. You basically want to make the cake all crumbs... no big pieces.
Next I incorporated 1 container of store bought buttercream frosting. To make sure all the cake is coated with frosting I have found it is really best to just get down and dirty use your hands.



Once it was all incorporated and my hands were washed I used my cookie scoop to scoop out nice and uniformed size cake balls. I put them onto a cookie sheet that was covered with tinfoil and once they were all scooped into the freezer they went.



After about an hour in the freezer the cake balls came back out to be hand rolled so they were smooth and compact and then I popped them back into the freezer while I melted the chocolate.



For this order I used light pink candy melts. Once the chocolates were all melted and I was ready to dip the cake balls I took them out of the freezer 2 at a time for dipping.

The dipping is the most difficult part and time consuming part of making these. I think I need to invest in a candy dipping set but for this order I used just a plain old spoon.
I placed each ball in the bowl of chocolate and spooned more chocolate over the ball to cover it completely.
Using the spoon I lifted out each cake ball and tapped the spoon on the side of the bowl a few times to get off the excess chocolate. Once the ball was covered and the excess chocolate tapped off I slid each ball off the spoon and onto another foil covered pan so the chocolate could harden.

Once all of the cake balls were covered and hardened, I used the extra chocolate to decoratively drizzle on the balls.



I think the final product always looks so cute and sophisticated! And they taste AWESOME!



In the end, one box cake and 1 container of frosting yielded 32 cake balls.

These cake balls were accompanied by some cookie dough and peanutbutter cup cupcakes! Here is what everything looks like all packaged and ready to be delivered!!







Have a happy week of baking!!!