Making Cake Balls (nomnomnom)

A diversion from intellectual and deep thinking today, to engage in…. making Cake Balls! I found this recipe from The Pioneer Woman, and they looked crazy easy to make. I mean, are you kidding? Cake balls? The things they charge $2 for at Starbucks? I’m totally in. Part of me expected a result worthy of Pinterest Fail, but they managed to be fool (and heather) proof.

(I’m also on a crazy sugar rush right now because I ate like 4 of them in quick succession)

Ok, so, the first thing you need to make cake balls is a cake. You can bake a normal cake. I made a white cake, probably duncan hines. You need to let it cool completely before you do anything else. The Pioneer Woman suggested that you actually leave it overnight, so that’s what I did. I baked the cake while Hannah was in the middle of a crazy meltdown over the fact that I wouldn’t let her play with my cell phone. This whole “I’m my own person and have my own needs and I’m going to express them,” part of toddlerhood is going to be a rough road, I can tell!

Right, so there’s the cake. It sat out overnight.

Next step, in the morning…you use two forks and pull the cake apart and turn it into little crumbles. Just crumble the heck out of it, a piece at a time, in a big bowl.

Then…you need a binding agent. And what better binding agent could there be than…

…icing. nomnomnom

A tub of pre-made icing. I used cheesecake flavor. Normal recipes call for a whole tub, Pioneer Woman said to use 3/4 of a tub because they could get mushy otherwise. And nobody likes a mushy cake ball, right? So I used about 3/4 of the tub. Mix it in until you can’t see it anymore. Then mix a little more. It should look like this.

Then, make little balls out of the mix. Stick ’em on a tray, on wax paper, and freeze for at least an hour.

Now here’s where the really fun part comes in. You need something to coat said cake ball. So melting chocolate. I was at Target when I was shopping, and they had some microwaveable melting chocolate, vanilla flavor, but I know they also sell the little chips at Michael’s, and the other-craft-store-that-I-refuse-to-mention-because-they-are-serious-hypocrites. I don’t have a double boiler, and so I used a glass bowl in boiling water, just like Pioneer Woman recommends. The vanilla coating stuff melted in about 5 minutes.

If you want to get all fancy, and you’ll be decorating them and stuff, you want to be so so so careful when dipping into the melted chocolate. You could put the stick through first, and then dunk using the stick. But since I had no intention of decorating them, I dunked them in without minding too much about how they would look, and stuck the stick in while they were in the coating. Put them back down on the wax paper with the little lollipop stick, and wait for them to cool off.

The result? nomnomnomnom.

Seriously, these things are GOOD. At this point, you could decorate them for a particular holiday. But I’m just eating them.

I’m keeping mine in the fridge so the chocolate coating doesn’t melt in this still-too-warm-where’s-fall-at-anyway weather. Must. Go. Get. Protein.

Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.

She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).

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