CAKE!!!

I'm a big fan of baking. It's fun, it reminds me of so many happy memories from my childhood - making chocolate chip cookies with my mom when I little, decorating cookies for the holidays and all the awesome treats that my mom used to make for us back when we'd have treat days for school. Baking is almost a therauputic thing for me, but at the same time, if I bake stuff, I have to eat it, and I have no need to have an entire cake sitting around my home.

So, this summer, on of my many cousins got married and one of the foods available before dinner were cake balls. After doing a little internet research, apparently cake balls have become quite popular over the last couple years, for all kinds of occassions. Guess I'd been missing out.

So this past week, I decided to bake some up - I wanted to see if this was something that would be easy to make and also be something that I could give out to certain agencies. The end result, they are pretty easy to make, a bit time consuming, but easy. I mean, you use a boxed cake mix, and around a can of frosting. Seriously. The cake balls allow for a lot of variation, you can pretty much put any cake and frosting combo together that you want. I made three different kinds: yellow cake with buttercream frosting mixed in them, funfetti cake with vanilla frosting and chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

After mixing those two parts together and letting it set in the fridge for few hours, I got out my Pampered Chef scoop and scooped them on to wax paper and then put them into the freezer for six hours. Then the cake balls get dipped in almond bark. Here is where I made a bit of a mistake. I'd gone to Hobby Lobby and purchased some red confectionery wafers. I'm not used to working with them, and probably should have thinned them out a bit. I was dipping the yellow cake into the red mixture and after it set I noticed that it was seriously thick. I used white almond bark for the other two, turned out much better. You can see the photo of the end result. I'll probably make them again, maybe experiment with some different mixtures, the chocolate one is really rich.