Cake Balls

Leslie picked out a red velvet cake for her 12th birthday party. Since this is not mine (or many others') favorite flavor, I decided to do something fun and add some yumminess at the same time!

Cake balls are super easy. Covering them in chocolate is not so easy and takes a bit of time and patience (testing, testing, this is Dresden we're talking about, and I have little of either one!)

So, after a few messy ones, I came up with a system:

*Yesterday I baked the red velvet cake according to the cake box directions.

*I let it cool and then put it in a huge bowl and smooshed it all up.

*I added 16 oz of frosting and mixed it all in nice and gooshy (but not too moist).

*Then it went into the fridge for more cooling so that it would be easier to form into balls (think sugar cookie dough).

*Leslie and I rolled them into small balls and put them on baking sheets in the freezer. We left them overnight to make them easier to dip AND because we had to go to the airport to pick up Kenzie!

This morning after breakfast I shooed the kids outside to fill up water balloons (why do I not learn to simplify!) Good thing I took breaks in between batches so I could clean up mud (El Paso doesn't do grass) and start loads of laundry...

Back to the process:

*I taped wax paper to my kitchen counter.

*I melted the chocolate in a mug (filled it up halfway and nuked it for a minute, then stirred).

*I toothpick-ed the little frozen cake balls and then dipped them in the chocolate. I used a spoon to completely cover them, and then set them down on waxed paper.

*About 7 or 8 frozen cake balls at a time will work with each half mug.

This is the "patience" part. I really wanted to just melt a whole bunch of chocolate at once, get all the cake balls out of the freezer and go for it. But, the cake balls got too warm and fell apart if I took more than 8 or so out of the freezer at a time, and the chocolate clumps as it cools. So this system worked well.

*Between each "batch" I also cleaned out the mug and spoon so I wouldn't have clumpy chocolate.

Voila! Yummy chocolate and white chocolate covered red velvet cake balls. I also did some cream cheese frosted cake balls and a couple of marshmallow covered ones because I ran out of chocolate chips (3 bags later)!

P.S. How do those recipe bloggers have patience enough to do each step perfectly and document it with awesome drool-over pictures? Too bad. One picture is good enough for this post.