Carrot Cake Balls by Default!

It's Christmas time!!!!  And at Christmas time all my messy-nosed toddlers and pre-schoolers help make delicious goodness for their parents for Christmas.... so we end up with beautiful, festive trays of wonderful tasty goodness, as long as we wipe noses often.

:)

One of our projects this year is/are tiny carrot cake squares decorated with an orange cream cheese carrot .... and green cream cheese stem!

This plate full of plain carrot cakes are the ones for after-school snacks. There will be MANY HAPPY faces this afternoon! I put 36 of these little cakes away... tomorrow we'll frost them with a star tip and pipe the carrot on top. (I showed the lot o' youse how to do the carrot cake squares HERE) My 13 year old buddies Casey and Kathryn are doing that project. Then we'll freeze the decorated mini-cakes until next Thursday when we assemble the cookie/cake gift trays. When I thaw them we'll place each mini carrot cake in a festive Christmas cupcake holder from Wilton that I found at WalMart.

I get a little hung up on presentation at Christmas!!!!

Harry and David have nothing on us!!!  :)

When I do mini cakes, I trim the crust. While the cake is still slightly warm I trim all four sides of the rectangle about a half-inch from the cake edge. Then I cut the cake in quarters the l-o-n-g way... and then in 6 equally distant rows. One cake gives you 24 petite cakes. SWEET.

But then I decided WHY WASTE THAT DELICIOUS CRUST AND 1/2 INCH OF CARROT CAKE GOODNESS????

WHY NOT MAKE CAKE BALLS WITH IT????  WASTE NOT, WANT NOT!!!!

Oh, happy day, that's just what I did. I had Kathryn mash up the cake trimmings (it ended up being about 2 cups of mashed cake just from those trimmings).

We added about 1/3 cup of cream cheese frosting. (Recipe HERE) 

Now the cake and frosting is mashed together. It looks like corn flakes smushed into yogurt... but it tastes like carrot cake and frosting! Oh, happy day!

Now we form them into balls.... Okay, they look like anemic meatballs, but remember, LOOKS ARE DECEIVING!!!

I'm melting pink candy wafer discs (white chocolate tinted pink) because I can't find the huge bag of fresh Hershey's white chocolate chips I bought a couple of weeks ago. I will probably find them in May... Just in time for Mother's Day... or something. But anyway, the pink melts are fine and quite festive, right?

So I'm melting them using the double boiler method, a bowl nestled over a pan of hot (not boiling) water.... stir occasionally.

But you can just microwave them, too.

And then you dip the balls into the melted chocolate:

Cool and eat!  You can also make "cake pops" if you have the cool sucker sticks around, but I was out of them. Oh my stars, these are the perfect cake ball consistency... I don't like gooey cake balls at all. The carrot cake crusts are just firm enough that they hold the frosting in the ball well... without getting mushy.

I'm 100% sold on this idea!