Easy Cake Balls
There are a blue zillion recipes out there for cake pops or cake balls. On a snowy morning I had three kids in my house (none of them my own.) We needed something to do that was fun and easy. So we made cake balls.
You will need a cake mix (baked according to directions) and approximately 4 ounces of softened cream cheese. There are a lot of recipes out there that have you use a cake mix, but you change the amount of eggs and use butter instead of oil or use milk instead of water. I have no doubt those recipes are good, but this one is easy, simple, and good.
For the chocolate topping, I used dark chocolate with 70% cocoa solids. The brand I used was something that one of Dave’s customers gave us for the holidays. I was storing it in my freezer for such a time as this. After a lot of research, I learned that the chocolate used for dipping should be 70% cocoa solid, and back in the recesses of my mind I remembered stashing some chocolate in the freezer. Viola! I was one happy camper to find Lindt Excellence Smooth Dark chocolate in my freezer – made in New Hampshire by a Swiss company. It was perfect. When we ran out of the dark chocolate, we used a bar of lighter chocolate with 70% cocoa solids. [Thanks you, customers of Dave!].
The kids and I had a lot of fun mixing the cream cheese into the crumbled cake crumbs by hand (after washing our hands, of course). When you send your kids to the bathroom to wash their hands, have them sing Row, row, row your boat all the way through while washing; then smell their hands when they come to the kitchen – guaranteed to bring you clean hands for handling food. After all hands had been checked for the fragrance of soap, we rolled the dough into balls and put them on a tray in the freezer for about an hour.
In the meantime, I melted the chocolate at 50% in the microwave, stirring every once in a while. I saved some for last – and when the chocolate was melted, I added the remaining pieces to the hot stuff and stirred until it was completely melted.
We tried solid toothpicks but found that craft sticks worked better. Because I had to melt the second batch of chocolate, the remaining cake balls became soft and the sticks pushed the balls apart.
Lesson learned: dip the cake balls in chocolate immediately when removed from the freezer so the balls stay intact in one piece.
It was a fun day. You can store the cake balls in the freezer or at room temperature. Your cake balls might not be as delicate and pristine as they would if you do it all yourself, but you’ll miss out on making memories with your kids.
Easy Cake Balls
Ingredients
- 1 cake mix with listed ingredients - your choice of flabor
- 4 oz. cream cheese - room temperature
- Chocolate with 70% cocoa
- Candy sprinkles
Instructions
- Mix and bake cake mix according to directions.
- While cake is still warm, crumble into pieces.
- Mix in cream cheese until mixtue can be formed into balls
- Roll into small balls
- Place on tray and put in freezer for at least an hour
- Break chocolate into small pieces
- Melt 3/4 of the chocolate in microwave at 50% in 15-30 second increments, stirring occasionally
- When chocolate is melted, add remaining chocoalte pieces and stir until completely melted
- Remove cake balls from the freezer and dip into the chocolate
- Add candy sprinkles as desired
- Store covered at room temperature or place in freezer for use at a later time
