Chocolate cake balls and a belated blogiversary

For those looking for my FFwD "warm weather" vegetable pot au feu, it will be coming, but not until tomorrow.  Life has just been a little crazy for the past few weeks, so my blogging and visiting has been slightly more erratic because of lack of time.   I will return to regular programming as soon as things calm down (likely to be after the end of the financial year!).

In the meantime, my poor old blog's fourth blogiversary went by on 26 May unnoticed and unremarked - a travesty!  This blog has brought a richness to my life in many ways, so it deserves better.  Happy 4th birthday, Laws of the Kitchen!

On 26 May, it was also The Biggest Morning Tea in Australia, an event to raise money for cancer research.  This cause has become very real to me since my Mum and our dog have both suffered from the disease, so I chipped in to my work's Biggest Morning Tea with three different kinds of cake.  As the date was appropriate, I will also adopt one of these cakes for my blogiversary celebration.

One of the types of cake I meant to bring in were Elinor Klivans Chocolate Covered Hi-Hats. My friends Steve and Craig had brought me back a deck of Elinor's cupcake cards as a gift from New York, and all of my cakes for The Biggest Morning Tea were from that deck. The hi-hats looked suitably spectacular, so they made the cut.  Unfortunately, I didn't realise that the hi-hats were made in Texas muffin pans.  This meant that when I stuffed all of the mixture into poor wee regular muffin tins, I ended up with erupting cake batter all over my oven, and cupcakes with weird overflowing tops that stuck to the top of the tin.

Faced with the dilemma of what to do with these ugly looking cupcakes, I took a bite of one of them - and fell in love.  The chocolate cake was moist and delectable and definitely was worthy of being eaten - the problem is, in the looks department, those cakes weren't up to scratch.  After some soul searching, I decided to make cake balls from them.  This decision was not taken lightly, as I have previously made red velvet cake balls and was less than impressed - it seemed a waste of good cake to me.  However, in this case, the cakes could not stand alone, so I had nothing to lose, and made them into  chocolate cake balls.

I used The Crabapple Bakery's Chocolate Fudge Frosting to glue the cake crumbs from the abandoned hi-hats into balls.  The frosting recipe has been posted here.  After freezing the balls for an hour or so, I dipped them in melted dark chocolate, and after the coating had set, I piped on squiggles in white chocolate for decoration.  And lo - out of the ashes, a phoenix emerged that was the hit of my cakes with the punters - and also a hit with me.  These chocolate cake balls were rich, moist, deeply chocolatey and decadent.    If you added a splash of brandy to the cake mix, you'd have a treat fit for after a dinner party.  Elinor's cake plus Jennifer Graham's chocolate fudge frosting were a match made in heaven - and I didn't miss those hi-hats after all.

Happy Friday folks!