Red Velvet Cake Balls

Do you have heaps of things that you want to make, but just don't seem to get there? For ages, I have wanted to try making Bakerella's cake balls, but just never got around to it. However, my butt was put firmly into gear when I thought that red velvet cake balls covered with white chocolate would make an elegant morning tea treat for Yan's wedding tea. Yan recently was married in China, and tomorrow, her first day back, we are hosting a morning tea for her at work.


My execution may not have been as elegant as I had hoped, and they took a little longer (and used much more chocolate!) than I expected, but I got there in the end.


I decided to use Bakerella's recipe for red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting for the balls. (I used her old cream cheese frosting recipe, which only has 4 cups of icing sugar instead of 6, and it worked fine.)


Here is my red velvet cake, which looks like a worn leather handbag for some reason:




The next step was to crumble the cake with my hands - a very therapeutic exercise:



After making the cream cheese frosting in the food processor, I mixed just enough frosting into the cake crumbs so that they would bind together into balls (and had quite a bit leftover):



The balls went into the freezer for an hour, and were then dipped in chocolate (half white, half dark) and topped with silver cachous:



I found the dipping part quite tricky, as if handled too roughly, the balls fell apart. They also tended to stick to my hands and the utensils I was using. I eventually found that the best coating method for me was to place a cake ball on a spoon, then holding it over the bowl of melted chocolate, use a second spoon to pour melted chocolate over the ball. I then tipped the ball out onto the parchment lined sheet, and covered the "bald" patch where the ball had rested on the spoon with extra chocolate drizzled over with a spoon.


It was a rather time consuming process to make these, and I used about 500g of chocolate (the cake weighed around 600g). It was fun to do and the balls tasted good, but I probably won't hurry to try it again.


Hope you all had a good weekend!