I'm sure you've all seen cake balls before, they've been floating around the internet for a couple of years now, most noticeably by Bakerella, who makes some phenomenal stuff.
This summer I was reading a parenting magazine that had an article about food on sticks for kids, and they had done cake pops, cake balls on sticks, with a sugar glaze instead of a dipped chocolate crust. I thought they looked fun and easy and it just happened that I needed to make a dessert for an upcoming family birthday.
I gave them a test run and while we enjoyed the cake balls, the glaze didn't work very well. Also, the dessert was going to have to travel to a different city and be stored overnight in a hotel fridge, so doing cake pops with sticks wasn't looking like a good idea. So we stuck with the balls.
Here is Bakerella's post on cake balls, if you'd like to see.
So you bake a cake. I made a box cake mix, I believe it was butter pecan. Bake it and let it cool. They break it up with your hands into fine crumbs.
Then you add frosting, again store bought. I used cream cheese frosting. Bakerella's tutorial uses a whole can and the magazine article used 1/2 a can. I used about 3/4's. Plop in the frosting and mix well until evenly incorporated and the cake will hold together in balls and you like the taste. Then form into balls. You could use a little scoop, but I just used my hands. I went fairly small, so the balls could be 1 or 2 bites. I got about 60. Cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Then you've got to coat them in something, cause they aren't very cute naked. As I said the glaze (powdered sugar and milk) didn't work for me, so I bought some of those candy chips from Michaels to dip them in. I am not very good with finicky stuff, so they didn't come out smooth, and some didn't even get a very good coating, but they looked not bad. I stuck them in little candy papers. And chilled again in the fridge.
Because these were for a birthday, I set some aside plain and some we "decorated" with icing tubes to read "Happy Birthday".
The end result looked like the baby may have made them, but! They tasted great and was a cute alternative to a traditional birthday cake. These would be fun for any kind of party and super fun for kids. I guess I'll have to work on my decorating skills for future kid birthday parties.....
