Cake Balls!

I made cake balls. Or stick-less cake pops. Or whatever you want to call them. Little mounds of squished up cake and icing dipped in chocolate. And guess what? They're kind of gross.

Which doesn't mean that I can stop eating them, of course. Here's what happened: we had a birthday party for Henry on the weekend and I tried to be a hero and bake a cake from scratch rather than going with a box cake. I have always had trouble with birthday cakes. I've preformed many successful culinary feats in my life, but birthday cakes elude me. Any other kind of cake and I'm fine. But I can not make a birthday cake to save my life. When I found out a few years ago that Aaron's mum's delicious birthday cakes come from a box I rejoiced and started using the box myself. This year, however, I got ambitious and tried for scratch. The cake fell, I cried and then I ran off to the store to grab a boxed mix.

So, what to do with the fallen cake? I crumbled it up, mixed it with the leftover icing from the successfully baked box cake (I do make my icing from scratch, thank you very much), rolled them into a bunch of balls, stuck them in the freezer for 20 minutes and rolled them in melted chocolate. Cake balls!

I know these things are all the rage, but they're kind of cloying. Maybe I used too much icing, but they're really sweet and kind of mushy. They're sort of tolerable if you eat them right out of the fridge, but if you left them on the counter for any amount of time they'd be disgusting and mushy.

So are cake balls the new cupcake, the new maracron, the new whoopie pie. No. And no.