Cake Balls for Christmas Gifts: Decadent, Delicious and Different!

We've made a couple hundred cake balls this week.... so in light of the fact that we've played with them before, I'm going to show you that post... and some new pics.

These cake balls are actually made from Heath bar brownies (Brownies made fudgy style and then toss in a bag of those decadent Heath chips... yes, the whole bag!) When they're done and cool, I take off the outside edge of the huge brownie pan and feed those delicious "scraps" to the kids... and then we mash the rest of the brownies in a big bowl...

And for brownies, they're fudgy already, so no need to add frosting to the mix!

Shape them into quarter-sized balls.... Dip in slightly melted milk chocolate....

And chill!   

Then we did the same with the carrot cake, so imagine this...

Carrot cake Math.

We doubled everything. Great math lesson, right? Math mixed with science and four-year-olds, my favorite combo!

EXCEPT when you accidentally TRIPLE the flour and double everything else... because youse know what we had to do then. We had to add in another whole recipe to make the ratio come out correctly.

THREE CARROT CAKES. 

So we had carrot cake snack after school.... We froze 36 full sized cupcakes (which will become a Christmas gift for someone!)  And we made about 100 carrot cake balls.

For the carrot cake balls we smushed carrot cake (a whole cake's worth) with about a cup and a half of homemade cream cheese frosting....

And then we formed it into balls like above. 

Pictures, you ask????

OY. I was too busy trying to keep them all alive while we were doing the cakes, doing fittings for their Nativity picture, doing homemade 4-year-old Merry Christmas Mom and Dad cards!

YIKES!!!!! Two adults, and we honestly didn't stop to breathe.... and tomorrow and Friday look just as busy because we don't have until the 25th to get things done. Our school has a two week vacation so my little ones last day here is December 18th.  So we're on countdown!!!  And Finn likes to HELP US:

Except that we're doing a Help the Homeless project on the 20th with a nice crew of kids here, but that's another blog!

Here's the original CAKE BALLS post:

So I made these wonderful cupcakes, homemade, searching for the perfect white or golden cupcake recipe....

"Betty Crocker's Light Golden Cake"

and then decided not to use the convection setting on the oven because it was already hot in the kitchen.

BIG MISTAKE.

So THEN we salvaged as much as we could... :)

Tossed the dark bottoms to Libby-the-Poodle...

And crushed the remaining cupcakes into crumbs.

I had Casey make butter icing:

1 cup soft butter
4 cups confectioners (powdered sugar)
3 teaspoons almond or vanilla (she used almond, I love this girl!!!)
1/4 cup milk

Mix butter and sugar on low, add milk and flavoring, whip on high for at least five minutes.

Add frosting to crushed/crumbled cake in bowl, just enough to be able to shape the cake/frosting mix into balls.

Now came the fun part:

We took three bowls and divided up the crumbled mix.

I added 1/3 cup seedless raspberry jam to one

I added 1/3 cup caramel sauce to the other.

I added 1/3 cup white chocolate chips to the third bowl of mix.

We formed each bowl into fifty-cent size balls, about an inch in diameter. But the size doesn't really matter, because now you're going to dip 'em.

We melted white chocolate chips in one bowl over hot water...

And dark chocolate Ghirardelli over the other pan of hot water.

And then we rolled those bad boys in various chocolates to see which would be crowd-pleasing faves.

OH MY STARS!!!!

Casey and I made so many people happy yesterday.

It was MANIC how happy they were!!!

:)

These are raspberry/vanilla filled:

These are caramel cake filled:

And these are white cake/frosting/white chips filled:

We turned our lemons into lemonade. We turned bad cupcakes into SERIOUS good eats!!!

We saw the glass as half full.

We...

Well...

You get it!!!!