My favorite thing about Easter is the candy and treats. I wanted to make something cool for Easter but it seems there’s only so much cool stuff that can be done to cakes. Then I learned about a Dallas company that sells cake balls. There’s looked fancy but I found a recipe online that basically said: bake and crumble a cake, mix with frosting, form little balls and dip in chocolate. Sounds easy enough, right? I decided to make it more dificult but making them into chocolate cadbury bunny eggs with frosting as the yolk and egg whites.
To start off I baked a regular box chocolate cake, I used a regular 9 x 11 rectangular pan, and let it cool for about 10 minutes. While it was still warm on the outside I crumbled at first half the cake into a large bowl. I did half in case something went horribly wrong but I think I could’ve easily done all of it. The recipe said to do it while it’s still warm, but be careful because for me warm turns to scalding hot in the middle.
I mixed in the frosting in small batches at a time. For a small bowl of cake it took a few scoops of frosting. i used vanilla frosting and the easiest way to mix was with my fingers. I found out that if you use enough frosting to make it sticky, then you don’t see the frosting. If I use a lot of colored frosting then it kind of colors the cake but not very strongly.
It took me quite awhile to figure out how to make the eggs work like they were supposed. I used plastic eggs for my molds, it just turned out that the camo ones opened long ways instead of across the middle like normal eggs. I packed one side of the egg to a little over flowing with the cake, and the otherside packed thickly with a little space to put a little yellow and white frosting. Then i closed the two egg halves together until they closed, then slowly pulled each side apart. If I had enough cake in there, then it stick together.
After a bit of a mess and some research, I learned that you need to freeze the cake balls before dipping them in chocolate. The cake balls are pretty wet when you first make an egg or just roll it into little balls, I can see them being perfect at that point to roll in coconut or powdered sugar. I made 14 successful eggs, and used 8 cubes of chocolate bark to coat them. I heated the bark in the microwave, which requires frequent reheating, and thickly coated the eggs. They ended up bigger then the plastic eggs, don’t melt at room temperature and were absolutely loved by everyone who ate them.
The baking was easy enough, following the directions on the cake box I made 24 cupcakes and had enough batter leftover to make a small loaf of cake about 1 in x 3 in. Cupcakes was a wonderful idea because they’re small so if I mess up I have a lot to work with, and those suckers were room temperature in like 10 mins. I usually don’t have the patience to let my cakes cool enough before trying to get creative.
This guy is my pride and joy, it’s a loop eared rabbit, the kind with massive floppy ears. Each ear is half a cupcake, the body is the small bread loaf, and both back legs are about 2/3 of a cupcake each. The tail is a marshmallow, in both pictures the candies are jelly beans and the garnish is green dyed coconut. This one I could see on the shelf of a bakery.
