My Cake Ball Disaster

So I decided that I wanted to do some baking this weekend.  Now I have a pretty amazing personal "from scratch" cookie recipe that I created myself and spent years mastering and I have some pretty amazing "from scratch" cake, pie and cobbler recipes, but it has been a while since I was able to spend some time de-stressing in the kitchen with my KitchenAid. I wanted to try something a little different this time to ease myself back in.  So I went with the biggest craze out there these days.  Cake Balls!

I wanted to find a way to do these a little on the low sugar side so first I bought some Pillsbury Sugar Free cake mixes and frostings.  I thought this will be perfect.  The only sugar will be in the candy coating.  For some reason though to me, even though it is sugar free ingredients it seemed like it was going to be so so sweet still.  Then I discovered this recipe on line for Pumpkin Spice Cake Balls.  In case you didn't already know this about me, I LOVE PUMPKIN!!!!  It is my favorite flavor ever!  One of the many reasons why Fall is my favorite time of year.  What isn't great about fall?  I am sure many of you are also saying "Hey!  It is April, V!  Not fall.  What's with pumpkin flavored anything?"  Well... In my world it is ALWAYS pumpkin season. :)

I came home Friday night after work and started on the cake. So this recipe involves making the cake with just a dry spice cake mix and one 15 oz can of pumpkin puree.  Now I have seen this recipe around before and even talked to a friend who tried it.  She says it works wonderfully.  I still have a tough time wrapping my head around the idea but Hey, what the heck, I'll try it.  So I did.

Like I said, the idea of mixing only canned pumpkin puree and dry spice cake mix seems very strange to me but it did end up looking like a batter...

Although it was REALLY thick.  So I managed to get it into the greased baking dish but that was pretty hard considering how thick it was.  It wanted to stay attached to the spatula.  But I managed to get it to cooperate.

Into the oven it goes!  The first set of directions I saw said to bake it for 20-25 minutes.  Who were they kidding????  It was still straight dough at 25 minutes.  So I continued to bake it for another 15 minutes.  Knife came out clean. YAY! Now to let it sit and cool.  I let it cool over night so I could then tackle this project again in the morning.

Ok now it is Saturday morning and it is time to start the final half of the Cake Ball Fun! So I take out the 1/3 less fat cream cheese the recipe called for. This was another reason why I was so drawn to this particular recipe.  Low fat cream cheese instead of high fat sugary sweet frosting as the binding agent. So I first break up the cake and discover that this cake is really moist.  How yummy would this thing be if I just made it as a pan cake?  Wow..... Oh... Wait...  That might not be such a good thing for cake balls though. This thing could almost be TOO moist.  It basically made a batter on it's own.  Well, this is the first time I have done this so maybe it's supposed to be like this.  So I add the cream cheese.  HA!!!  Yep.  So it's pretty doughy. I could probably bake this thing all over again.  It is a lot like a bread dough now.

Well no point is stopping now so lets just push through and see if it all falls together right.  I roll the dough into several little balls and stick them in the fridge a couple hours to firm up.

After the balls chill out for a while I start getting the almond bark ready. I chose to go the double boiler route so it would stay warm and melty longer. (Is melty a real word...? Well it is now.)

This stuff is seriously thick too.  I'm beginning to think it's me... But now it's time to start dipping and coating the balls.  Alright, So when I first starting thinking about making these, my friend M also decided she would have a cake ball making weekend too but wanted to get some lollipop sticks for hers.  I thought she was silly at first.  You don't need those.  You can make them just fine I think without using the sticks and making them all fancy.  Silly Silly Girl.  Hmmmmm......  Well Ok.. So I'm not too proud to admit that perhaps she may have been a bit smarter than me on this plan.  The sticks really would have made coating these balls in the candy coating much much easier and perhaps much more evenly coated too.  Next time, I'm totally getting the sticks. I kept scraping the coating off whenever I tried turning the ball or removing it from the coating to set on the wax paper.  Ugh.... Not to mention the bare spot on the bottom of all the balls from setting up on the wax paper.  Oops.

I get them all placed on the wax paper to and cover them with some sprinkles to hopefully make them a little prettier, and let them harden.

Yeah, Ok so even the sprinkles didn't help much.  They still aren't very pretty. But they are ready to be put in a container for my occasional treat.

So I have to admit they didn't taste all that bad.  They were pretty tasty but not as tasty as I thought they would be.  They are really really gooey and doughy, but they were my first attempt.  I just have to remember all the times I did trial and error with my cookie recipe before getting them just right. They will do for now I suppose.  I just don't think they are very worthy of sharing with my friends.  I'm kind of embarrassed with how they turned out.  So I will have to give this another try again later. Maybe I'll try baking the cake a little longer to the point of drying it out a bit and maybe also use less cream cheese.

Maybe when I try the chocolate/peanut butter chip ones I have been thinking of, they will turn out a little better. We will see.

So to recap the ingredients, here is all I needed:

1 box of dry spice cake mix
1 15 oz can of pumpkin puree
1 package of low fat cream cheese
1 package of almond bark
sprinkles

Maybe one of you can come up with some alterations to this to make them a little better.
So once completed, I decided to reward myself... and by reward, what I mean is wallow in disappointment. I decided to treat my self to an iced caramel macchiato.  Somehow, coffee always makes me feel better. :)