Well, the word epic describes what I did this weekend.
I made, for the first time, Bakerella's famous cake balls found here. I'd been wanting to try them for some time. I have seen them all over the internet and blog world. So, if everyone's making them, they can't be too hard, right? Hmmm...
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| photo compliments of http://www.txcn.com/ |
Well, I followed directions to the letter and they "the cake balls" turned out just fine. The problem was when I got to the dipping them in chocolate/almond bark part.
This turned out to be quite messy and difficult. I don't have a double boiler so I "made" one with a bowl sitting on the edge of a small saucepan filled with boiling water. While it worked, I got multiple steam burns. Owww!
Okay...back to the epic fail part. I bought a package of vanilla candy melt. According to everyone's posted info., one package should sufficiently cover 30 cake balls. Well, I guess I rolled mine too small because I ended up with 51 cake balls!! Needless to say, I ran out of vanilla candy melt. No worries, I thought. I'll just melt some milk chocolate chips. I only had a 1/2 bag of those, so, of course, I ran out. ((sigh)) I found a couple of small bars of vanilla candy melt in my baking cabinet. When I melted it, it still didn't look like enough. So...my creative mind thought,"hey! I have some left over glace' in the fridge from my valentine shortbread and fancy sugar cookies." I scraped up a spoonful of the red glace' and added it to the melted vanilla candy melt. Oh my. Do NOT do this. I cannot stress enough here! It was one hot mess. Whatever chemical reaction happened, ruined the candy melt. It got very dry, first, which I am sure was from the powdered sugar in the glace' and then Ms. Brilliant, here, added a dab of water. What happened? It all wadded up together, after turning a pretty shade of pink (which I liked, by the way) and separated leaving it a wad in quite a bit of watered down glace.' I almost took a picture of it, but it was too sad! There would be no dipping with this mess! It clumped together like wax! What was I thinking?!
I ended up putting the last 8 naked cake balls in a ziplock and freezing them and tossing the pink mess in the trash. Lord!
I will post a pic of the cake balls tomorrow. They actually turned out alright. Not as pretty as Bakerella's but, hey, she's done it longer than I have! I had visions of pretty, smooth cake balls. That did not happen. My candy melt ones look like little tiny scoops of ice cream. Not too bad, but not what I was going for. Not quite sure why they were lumpy. I stirred the stuff repeatedly. I have steam burns on my fingers to prove it! The kids said they tasted great. I tried one. Not my cup of tea. I am not a raw dough kinda person. I know these aren't raw dough but they reminded me of it, texture wise, and I just couldn't eat them.
Have you ever tried to make these? Any words of advice on the dipping part? What worked for you?
4 comments:
Thank you so much for all of your sweet comments at Thrifty Decorating! :) They are so encouragin! I'm hoping to get a linky going soon and I'd love for you to link some of your recipes! They all look so good!
those look DELICIOUS! i wish i had advice for you... but i never have made them! :/
Hi Karen.
I've made them before but they were too sweet for me. I used the candy melt and it was a huge mess trying to coat them with a fork but they turned out okay. I had more success making cake pops since I had a stick to dip it it with. The one thing I learned is to let the balls freeze a bit longer than she recommended since I don't work as quickly as she does.
If I ever make them again, I'll have to scale back the amount of frosting to cake used. Mine were so sweet they would give you a cavity if you looked at it sideways.
Ha! That's so funny! I did something similar with adding food coloring. It was horrible!
Thanks for stopping by. Yes, the O;Henry bars are to die for! I'm pretty picky about the sweets I eat (even though I bake everything.) But what I eat is different. These I ate!!!
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