Did Someone Say Cake Ball?

While I was in Utah, I fixed a little birthday lunch for my mom and two of her friends. I think my mom had a hard time sitting in the living room watching me cook before the meal and then clean up afterwards, but she struggled through. The lunch was so much fun. My mom has the nicest friends.

For the lunch my friend Sandy helped me make our own little version of "cake balls." Yummy. Cake balls. I swear the other day, Evan and I were just sitting in the kitchen when he looked up at me and said, "cake ball." They were a hit!

Bakerella gives the full cake ball instructions and tons of variations on her blog. We altered our versions a bit.

Like Bakerella's version, we started with a cake mix (red velvet), baked according to the package directions. Then you break it up into tiny pieces and stir in one container of cream cheese icing. Once you get the gooey goodness mixed up, you shape it into balls. We used an ice cream scoop. We also sampled it at this point. Evan did too...

It was good, so we kept going. While those were chilling in the freezer for 15 minutes or so, we put small cupcake liners into a mini muffin pan. We melted chocolate (not chocolate chips though--the disks you can buy to make candy--when we ran out of those we tried chocolate chips and they didn't set up quite right). Here is what we used--all purchased at our local Wal-Mart. 

We pulled the cake balls out of the freezer, put some chocolate in a muffin cup and stuck our cake ball in so the chocolate came up about half way the sides (in the picture above you can see that it will end up looking like the cupcake liner. We put it back in the freezer to let the chocolate set up. Once it was set, we removed the cupcake liner. Next we melted white chocolate and tinted it pink. We dipped the tops of the cake balls in the pink, sprinkled it with sprinkles...what else...and topped it with a red M&M! Ta-da! Cake ball cupcakes. I don't have any pictures of these steps for several reasons: a) you have to work quickly with chocolate b) Evan was hopped up on sugar at this point and needed some extra chasing and c) I was busy eating cake balls. I did get a picture of Evan with a finished product though. I finally figured out he really only wanted to eat the M&M and sprinkles off the top, but he looked so cute holding it. 

So, there is my quick version...but check out Bakerella's great site at www.bakerella.com. She has some super cute Easter ideas up there.

We made far more cake balls than we dipped for the cupcakes (for some reason I thought I should double the recipe--that really wasn't necessary). With the leftovers, I pushed them down into a cupcake liner and just topped them with either chocolate or white chocolate. We sprinkled some with toffee chips. They were just as yummy even if they weren't quite as cute. As you'll see on Bakerella's site, the possibilities with cake balls are endless.