Cake Balls - April 20 & 22, 2011

Wednesday April 20

For this week, Allyson suggested cake-pops, as she was considering them for a mother's day gift. Since we were pulling ideas together at the last minute, and since what she proposed was doable with ingredients on hand (once we omitted the "pop" part), we tackled this treat. (Regrettably I did not get photos of most of the process, but did remember to snap a few at the end.)

Before Allyson came over I flipped through my cookbooks to find a suitable cake and was pleased to realize that I had, a few months past, frozen just the right amount of sliced strawberries to use in the Strawberry Cupcakes from JVB pg. 87.

I measured out the wet ingredients, and then, while I was running the frozen chunks of strawberries through the food processor, Allyson measured and mixed the dry ingredients.  

The resulting batter was a very pink. Since the fate of our finished baked delight was to simply be crumbled up again, we opted to make a cake rather than cupcakes, to save on cup-cake pan liners.

Once the cake was in the oven, we discussed options for frosting. For cake-balls, a cake is crumbled and mixed with frosting (3/4 of a can of frosting, according to the online recipe Allyson had read, and on which we were basing our project), and then dipped in chocolate.

As we were discussing options, I recalled I had a large amount of left-over lime butter cream frosting from the coconut-lime birthday cupcakes I'd made for my sister (vctotw pg 108) *Until I looked up the recipe for this post I would have sworn that the frosting was also coconut-lime, not just lime - that explains a lot, actually. 

I pulled the tub from the fridge, and inspected it closely. Though it had been a month, the frosting still seemed ok - a taste test proved it to be so. We figured that the combination of strawberry with coconut-lime might be usual, but wouldn't be bad. With our frosting situation set, we tidied the kitchen, and sat down to wait out the cake - baking process.

About 25 minutes in, the cake smelled delicious, so we went to check. Mostly done - another 2 minutes and the toothpick came out clean, so we removed the cake from the oven. I'm glad we followed our noses rather than the recipe on this (which said 30 minutes for cupcakes, and 1 hour for a cake). Looking at the recipe again later I realize it stipulated a loaf pan, which was significantly deeper than the standard 9" square cake pan we used. With the cake out of the oven we saw the cake had started to pull away from the edge of the pan, and were disappointed that the cake was golden, having lost the beautiful pink it had been uncooked.

We let the cake cool, and after about 10 minutes, managed to flip it out onto a wire rack. It was still slightly warm when we went to crumble it, but it was getting late, and we had already decided to save the dipping in chocolate for Friday, when we meet up with friends. Since we'd only have a small window of time before gaming commenced (yes, we are D&D geeks - but our gaming group is full of willing taste-testers), we wanted to have the cake balls formed and chilled before then.

We did a mini trial with a spoonful of cake crumbs and a little of the frosting, and determined the taste was not horrible. We ended up using about 2 cups of frosting, stirring it in to the crumbled cake in spoonfuls until the mix held together on its own. We set to with the cookie scoop and a spoon, and made balls about 2 - 2 ½ " in diameter, which we covered and set in the fridge to chill, and wait until Friday.

Friday April 22

The chocolate-dipping was to take place at Allyson's house, so I brought over the cake balls and a bag of vegan chocolate and white chocolate chips. Allyson set up her double boiler, and we decided to start with the straight up chocolate.

"Seized" chocolate

Now, the original recipe called for candy melts, and I suspect these may result in a different consistency of liquid chocolate than straight up melted chocolate chips. Coating the cake balls ended up being a challenge. We ended up having to re-mold the cake balls, as they threatened to crumble as we rolled them in the melted chocolate. Because of the consistency of the chocolate, we did not get a smooth coating on most of them (aggravated by the fact the treats lacked sticks, so we had no real way to move them through the chocolate other than by fork and wooden paddle). Also we learned, the hard way, that when your chocolate is getting too thick, do not try to remedy it by adding water. (according to this Good Eats video, a little liquid in chocolate causes seizing - which we had - remedy is more liquid. Next time we'll know (~minute 7:45)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLpt_n6kWss)  Luckily we had more chocolate. We decided to stick to regular chocolate, and coated most of the rest of the cake balls, leaving some uncoated for people who didn't want to experience flavor overload.

Uncoated and chocolate-dipped cake balls

Overall, the chocolate and lime seemed to dominate the flavor, though the texture of the cake balls was definitely influenced by the harder-to-crumble edges of the cake, and the slightly pulpy strawberry blend. I would like to try this recipe again, perhaps with a plain cake and simple flavor icing, and see if we can improve on the chocolate application technique (deeper bowl? treats on a stick? pouring chocolate over the treat?)

New tools/ ingredients:  none
Recipes used: Strawberry Cupcakes Joy of Vegan Baking pg 87;  Lime Buttercream Frosting Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World  pg 108
Co-bakers: Allyson
Date: April 20 and 22, 2011