A Cake Ball Fail of Epic Proportions
I’m sure you’ve heard of this new fad going around called cake balls. There’s a whole restaurant dedicated to them here in Austin called Austin Cake Ball. They’re bite-sized, delicious, and cute as bugs, and I thought to myself, “How hard can they be?” I’m pretty sure that’s where things started to go downhill; I jinxed myself. Jen was going to help me create these cake balls, but she just had surgery, and after a trip to Michael’s and a trip to HEB for supplies, she was tired, so we decided I should tackle them by myself. There was absolutely no reason why I couldn’t make these cake balls on my own, agreed? I mean, how hard could they be? They’re just little, tiny cakes in the shape of balls. Right. Moving on.
I made the cakes and they turned out beautifully. It was a true testament to the patience I rarely exhibit in the kitchen when all THREE cakes (one 9X13 and two 9” round) came out of their pans as complete cakes. (Did I mention that I couldn’t decide between chocolate and vanilla cake balls so I went ahead and made both? Yeah… I don’t ever start small. Ever.) This brought to mind the great Cake Explosion of 2011. I had purchased, at a fabulous discount, an airplane cake pan, and I was super-excited to make an airplane cake for my father-in-law for his birthday in a few weeks. Because I knew NOTHING about decorating a cake, Jen graciously offered to teach me, so we set up shop in her kitchen to do a test-run on the airplane cake. Since it was for me, I chose a strawberry cake. Please note that strawberry cakes are red; this is important later in this story. When we took the cake out of the oven, I was SUPER-excited to take it out of the pan and see what it looked like. Several times, Jen told me to wait, that it was still too hot and wasn’t ready to be flipped. Did I listen? Of course not. I mentioned earlier how impatient I am in the kitchen. I grabbed my oven mitts (note to self: if mitts are required, the cake is too hot to flip) and flipped the cake over on to the cooling rack. I whacked it a few times on the bottom for good measure and lifted the pan. Half of the cake was on the cooling rack. The other half of the cake was still in the pan. I kid you not…it seriously looked like my plane had blown up mid-flight (remember the red cake?). Now is also a good time to mention that my greatest fear in the world is being involved in an airplane crash. Needless to say, I have not attempted another airplane cake. If I ever do, rest assured that it will not be a strawberry cake, and I WILL let it cool before flipping it on to the cooling rack. Moving on again.
Once the cakes cooled completely, I had to crumble them up into little pieces and add frosting so that the little pieces would smoosh back together and allow me to form them into cute, little balls. I started with the two vanilla cakes. They crumbled okay, though I noticed that the “crusts” on the cake - top, bottom, and sides - were not crumbling very well at all. When I crumbled my chocolate cake, I scraped off the crusts. This left me with less cake but a much better overall consistency. My kitchen island was reminiscent of the 2011 explosion when I was finished crumbling, mixing and rolling my cake balls, but since Daddy and I re-grouted the island a few weeks ago, everything cleaned up easily. Thank goodness for that! I put my cake balls in a tub and stuck them in the refrigerator for a few hours to chill, literally and figuratively.
Once my cake balls were cold, it was time to decorate them. I had picked up several bags of those white chocolate candy melts at Michael’s (mostly because I couldn’t settle on a single color), and I decided to start with green. Not exactly sure what I was doing, I poured half of the chips into a bowl and stuck them in the microwave at 50% power for one minute, then stirred every thirty seconds afterwards in an attempt to get the chocolate to the consistency it appeared to be in the great book of cake pops I’d also picked up at Michael’s. According to the pictures, the chocolate should be as drizzly as what you’d find in a fondue pot or a chocolate fountain. Yeah…no. That never happened. I pulled the chocolate out of the microwave, stirred it, decided it needed a bit more time because it still wasn’t drizzly (I made this decision based on the fact that I could shove it all to one side and it just kind of stayed there), and stuck it back in the microwave. Thirty seconds later, the chocolate had taken on a new form: it was chunky. I read the back of my candy melts bag and determined that I had over-melted my chocolate and ruined it. Damn. Thankfully, I’d only used half of the bag. Discouraged a bit but not dejected, I began looking at my other options. Scotty (God bless him) suggested I use my double-boiler, so I pulled it out and immediately dropped the lid on my (bare) foot. OUCHIE! After hopping around for a few minutes, I resumed my experimentation.
The candy chips (which are really white chocolate-flavored colorful pieces of candy) seemed to melt pretty well, though I still never achieved the runny consistency I so desperately wanted. When I finally decided that it was as good as things were going to get, I grabbed a cake ball and stuck it in the chocolate. The stick fell out and the cake ball broke apart. After fishing it out with a fork, I decided that perhaps I should melt the chocolate even more, so I left it on the double-boiler, stirring constantly, for another few minutes. It got a little runnier, but not by much. I grabbed another cake ball and swirled it around in the chocolate, this time more gently. I immediately noted a serious issue with my melted chocolate: because I had only used half of a bag, it wasn’t deep enough for me to cover my entire cake ball in the melted yumminess. I swirled the cake ball around as best I could, but I still ended up only coating about three-fourths of my cake ball with a lumpy, incredibly uneven coating of green goop. Later, when I FaceTimed Jen, laughing hysterically, she noted that my cake balls looked a lot like mini Shreks, ears and all.
At this point, all I could do was laugh. All Scotty could do was laugh. It was a disaster, and we both knew it. I informed Scotty that unless our future children want rum cakes for every. single. birthday., they are getting something pre-made from a bakery. Why is it that I am (in my humble opinion) a darn-good cook and a fairly talented artist yet I can’t frost or ice or decorate something edible to save my life?? This just doesn’t make sense to me. Oh, well. Scotty and I decided to go ahead and eat two of the four and a half cake balls I’d managed to mostly coat in chocolate with the theory that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Scotty took a bite. I was washing my hands. Scotty took another bite. I grabbed my cake ball. Scotty had an odd look on his face as he worked on swallowing his second bite. I took my first bite. I made a funny face. “This is truly AWFUL!” I said, trying to decide if it was uncouth to spit out my cake ball into my palm in front of Scotty. I opted for the trash can instead. Scotty nodded and followed suit. We both started laughing again. Seriously… after all that, the least the cake balls could have done for me was taste good, but no. They were terrible. I have NO idea what went wrong. I tasted the cake before I turned it into balls, and it was quite tasty. ‘sigh’
Tomorrow, I am taking my remaining cake balls and the two unopened bags of melty chips to Jen in hopes of learning how to melt chocolate correctly (you have no idea how ridiculous I feel typing that). Maybe I should just go make a rum cake instead… :)