Sweet Nothings

Today I'm going to share with you a yummy experiment from this past Christmas. I was first introduced to the idea of cake balls by accident. I was baking Reagan's birthday cake last February, and at some point while the cake was in the oven, I realized I had committed the worst of baking sins: I had neglected to grease my cake pans. I let the cake finish baking, then scraped the delicious cake out of the pans and into a giant bowl. I'm not one to let something go to waste, so after frantically running to the grocery store for more cake mix and getting cake #2 into the oven, I began to ponder just what I could do with the crumbled cake. As usual, I posted my plight on Facebook, hoping for some tips from the baking experts on my friends list. Someone suggested turning the mess into cake balls. I was intrigued, so I searched Google for some recipes. They sounded incredibly easy to make (I'm all about easy when it comes to food), so I gave it a try. Basically, you bake a cake, crumble it all up, and mix it with a container of frosting. Then, you form the cake/frosting mixture into balls, and dip those in chocolate. Easy peasy! My cake was Devil's Food and the frosting was milk chocolate. I then dipped them in white chocolate. They were pretty yummy, but I thought they could be better. I began to ponder other flavor combinations, but being a VERY lazy cook (these are simple, but pretty time consuming to make), I never followed through with another experiment...until Christmas of this year. My mother was in town, and she was in the mood to make some Christmas treats. I told her how I'd thought of doing cake balls using my grandmother's Apricot Nectar Pound Cake mixed with a lemon glaze and dipped in white chocolate. We bought all the ingredients, but because they take at least a couple of days to make, we didn't get around to making them. However, a couple of weeks later, the kids were home from school, and I was bored. We had plans to go to a Christmas caroling party, so I thought I'd give the cake balls a try and hopefully get rid of most of them at the party. I was thrilled with the results! I got rave reviews at the party, and I've had a couple of people ask how I made them. Thus today's blog post!

First, let's start with the cake. Here is the recipe for my grandmother's pound cake. This is, of course, delicious all on it's own. She made this every time family would come for a visit, and I believe if you ask any member of the family, they'd say it was their absolute favorite of Grandma Osburn's dishes. It's SO moist; more so than any pound cake I've ever had.

Apricot Nectar Pound Cake

Lemon Supreme cake mix

1/2 cup sugar

1 can apricot nectar juice (I can usually find it in the juice aisle)

3/4 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

Sift the cake mix with the sugar. Add juice and oil; mix well. Add one egg at a time and beat well. Normally, you'd grease your bundt pan, but since we don't need a beautiful whole cake, you can skip this step. Bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour.

For the glaze, you'll need 2 cups of powdered sugar and some lemon juice. Like most good cooks, my grandma didn't have an exact measurement for the juice. You just pour enough in until it "looks right". I have to say, I think I got a little happy with the juice, as the glaze was pretty thin. But for cake balls, it seemed to be just right!

Now comes the work. Dump your cooled cake into a giant bowl; add the glaze. Mix this all together. Time to make some cake balls! I preferred doing this by hand, but I could see a melon baller coming in handy here. Also, you may want to make them a little bigger than I did. I made balls that were approximately 1 inch in diameter. There were pros and cons to working with this smaller size. Pro: It was pretty easy to coat them in chocolate without them falling apart. Con: There were SO MANY OF THEM, I thought I'd never be done!! Now, most recipes will tell you to start dipping them in chocolate, but I've learned a helpful trick. I put trays of the balled up cake mixture in the freezer for several hours. This is why making them was a two day process for me. I actually dipped them the next day.

Melt your chocolate in a double boiler (if you have one, which I don't). I melted mine in a glass bowl sitting on top of a pot of boiling water. Only melt small amounts at a time, as the chocolate gets hard to work with as it cools. The process I used was more like coating instead of dipping. I pulled five balls of cake out of the freezer at a time. I stabbed one with a shish kabob skewer, held it over the bowl of chocolate, and spooned the chocolate over it. Drop it on wax paper. The chocolate will harden pretty quickly, so if you want to do something fancy like top them with sprinkles, you have to work FAST. I like to store the finished cake balls in the fridge.

These are so time consuming, but SO WORTH IT. The chocolate seals in the moisture of the cake, and the finished product just melts in your mouth. It's very similar to candy, like a truffle. I'm trying to think of a name for this specific variety instead of just "cake balls". Lemon Drops, maybe? Apricot Nectar Truffles? Hmmm...