So it's the summertime now and coming home from college to see my old high school friends is always a treat. Unlike everyone else our age who gets together in the summer to go off into the woods, light a bonfire and drink cheap beer to loud music (I live in Maine) we take a...different approach to celebrating our togetherness again. I found this recipe AGES ago and posted it on my facebook to great celebration and so we all knew that we absolutely had to try making it. Apparently Cake Bites (so much easier on my juvenile brain than calling them Cake Balls...though believe me, in our sugar-induced state many junior high balls jokes were had throughout the creation of these) have been a thing for a while, but who am I to follow trends? I make what looks delicious. These looked beyond delicious. Later, when we were eating them, someone said that they were quite obviously a five year old's dream candy and it is so so true. Ridiculously true. The insane sugar rush we all partook in just MAKING them, much less eating them...but anyways. Beware giving these to children (though they are the perfect food to make WITH children!). Also beware, they are quite labor intense (though each step is ridiculously easy there are lots of steps) and veeeeeeeery messy. Have fun!
We decided that we wanted to make red velvet truffles with traditional buttercream frosting and devils food truffles with chocolate frosting and we would dip them alternately in white and dark chocolate. We cheated and used mixes and premade frosting (which broke my heart, it always does to use a mix of any kind, even for Angel Food cake, but this was about having fun not making quality) but after tasting how delicious these turned out I'm dying to do the homemade kind. It will be so much richer and tastier!! To make them you bake your cakes and then let them cool. This is the boring part. Well, not COMPLETELY boring (licking the spoon is still fun) but definitely the dullest part of the entire process.
Once the cakes are cool you can start to rip them up! This is fun and actually not very messy at all. Be sure they are completely cool though, or you'll do what we did and almost get burned several times in our eagerness to demolish cake. Then you add the frosting. This is where the messiness comes in.
Mix thoroughly. This is a great thing to let kids do (so is the mashing up of the cake). I should know; we basically had a bunch of college-aged five year olds in the kitchen this night. We got messy and smeared cake all over each, but in our defense we had eaten a lot of cake batter and it was very late at night. Then you have to roll the frosting-cake mixture into balls. Cynthia suggested using an ice cream scoop for help in forming the balls but we just dug them out of the bowl by ourselves. Once you have lots of this stuff all over your hands be careful though, it gets harder to form nice pretty uniform balls. You might have to clean it all off your hands every few dozen truffles.
Put the rolled balls into the freezer for a few hours to make it easier to dip them later. It was easy for us to wait for them because we just all put in a movie and hung out while they chilled. I must admit during this time we lost a lot of steam and when the movie was over we had to brew up some coffee along with melting the white and dark chocolate for dipping.
Cynthia says to just use melting chocolate but we didn't really feel like it and just used standard chocolate chips instead and it worked out okay. One think we learned though is make sure your chocolate stays hot--we took ours off the burner to dip and after a bit the chocolate solidified too much to be of much use and resulted in VERY messy truffles--and only take the balls out of the freezer a few at a time so that the ones sitting on the counter don't go all soft, like ours did, resulting in more messy truffles. Also, have your sprinkles ready to decorate so they look all pretty!!! Naturally ours didn't look nearly as nice as the ones shown from the original recipe, but we're a bunch of 20-somethings who just wanted deliciousness and didn't care too much for appearance.
These truffles would make excellent gifts, so long as you are more adept at making them pretty than we were. Also, buy extra chocolate because we ran out with half of the truffles still left and they are now in my freezer waiting to be finished. Which I have promised myself I will do. All in all, a much more satisfying and a better bonding activity than getting drunk in the woods, that I promise ^_^
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