Chocolate Cake Truffles

My birthday is coming up, therefore I have been craving cake for weeks now. I was not going to make one, I had resigned myself to the fact that it would be too much temptation. But after actually showing some progress on the scale and working out at least three times a week, I finally caved. Yesterday I pulled out my pink scraping beater blade for my Kitchenaid mixer (an early bday gift from my BFF Jessica!), a box of cake mix, my two 9 in silicone round cake pans and got to work. Granted, I had wanted to try to make a cake from scratch, but I already had this box of mix, and quite frankly I was lazy. So I made the cake as the directed, it was Duncan Hines Butter Recipe Fudge. Sprayed down my round silicone pans and baked. While the cake was in the oven I went to work on homemade buttercream frosting.  Tony and I were both in love with the frosting on our wedding cake. Our baker, the awesome Judy Laberge of Charlotte, VT shared her secret with us, she uses almond extract in her buttercream, so I decided that is exactly what I would do. I used the recipe on the side of the Domino confectioner's sugar box, it's very simple:


1 lb box of confectioner's sugar
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
3-4 TBSP milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract (this was my own addition)


Then I mixed it all in my mixer until creamy. It ended up being VERY sweet, but still delicious!
So when the cakes were done I pulled them out of the oven, and decided to let them cool in the pans for about 15-20 mins. I then wanted to flip them out and let them continue cooling on the racks. Well the first cake flipped out of the pan just fine. The second crumbled upon flipping. I in turn flipped out! My cake was ruined!! What was I going to do? I then began researching online and found the perfect solution: Bakerella's cake balls!


I took the crumbled cake, threw it in a large mixing bowl, crumbled it into small crumbs with my hands, and then mixed in some of the buttercream. I think I added too much frosting though, as my cake was very moist, I then rolled the mixture into balls and placed them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. I ended up with 3 dozen cake balls.

The above cake balls then went in the freezer overnight. Today I took them out, Bakerella suggested only taking out a few at a time, but I took out a tray at a time. I then poured about half the bag of Hershey's Milk Chocolate chips I had in my pantry in a bowl, zapped them in the microwave for about a minute and went to dunking. I used a spoon and rolled the balls around until they were coated with chocolate, then spooned them back on the tray, and when all were done popped the tray back in the freezer. And then repeated with the second tray. Then it was decorating time! I melted about 2 oz of white chocolate chips, again in the microwave for about 45 second on 70% power. I threw in about a teaspoon of a fat free margarine in there too, and then spooned the melted white chocolate into a sandwich size Ziploc bag, cut off a small bit of the corner and piped the designs. Here's the finished product, they are going to work with Tony tomorrow:
 

 

So, next time your cake crumbles when you try to flip it out of the pan, just whip up a batch of these! But be warned, according to my husband they are highly addictive!