Chocolate!!!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Have you ever been in such dire need of chocolate that you find yourself tearing the kitchen apart looking for a morsel? Don’t fool yourself – you know you’ve done it! Well, that was me yesterday.

My sister, Jourdan, started telling me about this bakery in Frisco that sells CAKE BALLS and how delicious they looked when she was watching her co-worker eat them (poor thing). We looked online, and the bakery was already closed, and they won’t be opening up again until Tuesday. OH NO! What to do!?
Google a recipe for cake balls! All of the recipes that we looked at called for a pre-packaged cake mix and a can of icing. Well, we didn’t have that either. So, we decided to get creative and make the cake recipe on the back of the Hershey’s baking cocoa. We BARELY had enough cocoa to make the cake, so what are we going to do about the icing?! And the ganache?! No worries, I have a package of melting chocolate that I purchased for $1.00 at Big Lots that will work! So here’s what we did:
1. Bake the cake according to the package directions
2. Straight out of the oven, crumble the cake into a large bowl
3. Mix in ½ of the package of melting chocolate (or the entire can of icing if you have one)
4. Stir until well blended
5. Melt the other ½ of the melting chocolate (or whip up some ganache if you have the ingredients on-hand) and dip each ball into the melted chocolate with a fork (or if you are us, your bare hands work better!)

These cake balls were SO delicious and relatively easy. It is a messy job but sometimes those are the most fun. They were a hit with our family and made PLENTY to share. We are eager to experiment with different combinations of cake flavors and icing/ganache varieties. This would be a great recipe to get the kids involved with because it is an assembly line style process. For example, one person crumbles cake while the other adds icing. One person rolls the mixture into balls while the other dips them into the ganache. Try it!

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