Chocolate Cake Poppers

I'm still working on a name for these. Cake Balls doesn't sound good, so Cake Poppers will stick for now (Thanks Hugh). I mentioned the chocolate buttercream icing in an earlier post. Here's what I did to make these little gems. I had a lot of cake trimmings from the Toy Story cake. I made it extra thick since it needed to feed quite a few people. When you bake a cake, the cake always domes up on you in the middle, even if you use insulating strips on your pans. Since the cake was a half sheet and I used a LOT of mix in the pan, I had quite a large dome in the middle to cut off. I saved any trimmings I didn't eat (*grin*) and put them in a plastic bag until the weekend when I could get around to using it for this little experiment. I mixed up some of the chocolate buttercream with a bunch of cocoa to make it dark and I used heavy cream this time. OMG! I can't tell you how good that stuff was straight out of the bowl. I could clog my arteries eating the stuff but I would die a happy man. Once the icing was ready, I put all of the chocolate cake trimmings in the bowl and mixed it into the icing. The result was a decadent truffle-like mixture. Then I put the mixture in the fridge so that it woud firm up and I could work with it. When cool, I scooped out small amounts and rolled them into little balls. Once that was done, I put them in the freezer for a few hours to firm up. I melted some semi-sweet chocolate in a double boiler and dipped the frozen balls into the chocolate. They were then returned to the freezer to set up. The only thing I would say needs improvement is that the chocolate needs to be tempered or mixed to make the end result harder at room temperature. The chocolate was a little soft, and ended up being a little sticky with the humidity. They were delicious though. I took about a cookie sheet and a half worth of these to the office and they were gone in about an hour. People would try one, then leave with a small plate with three or four more. Not bad for leftovers!