Cake Balls

So, after you've finished carving your tractor cake, you're going to have a bunch of leftover cake.


And possibly some leftover frosting, am I right?

And we wouldn't want that all to go to waste, right? So here's the perfect recipe to use it up, and make some delicious treats in the process! This recipe is completely not mine, it is totally stolen from Bakerella, who is amazing. If you've never visited her blog, it is a real treat - every one of her pictures is beautiful, and she gives easy step-by-step directions for every gorgeous confection she comes up with. Anyhow, she makes these great treats called Cake Balls (and cake pops, which is what I set out to make, but I couldn't find any sucker sticks).

So, the first step is to crumble your leftover cake into crumbs in your bowl:


Elmo placemats and an adorable helper are completely optional.

Next, you combine the cake crumbs with the frosting, at a ratio of one box of cake mix to one tub of frosting. I estimated that we had about 2/3 of a box of cake mix worth of cake left over, so we started with about 2/3 of a tub of frosting, and mixed them together, with our hands.

Then you form the mixture into balls & put them in the fridge for a while. Please ignore my nasty old cookie sheet.


After you let them cool for a while, then you can cover them with candy melts or just melted chocolate chips or whatever you have on hand. I covered some with peanut butter chips, and they taste delicious, but don't look so great. So then I switched to milk chocolate, and finished up with semi-sweet chocolate chips, just for variety. :) And here is the finished product:


This was actually a really easy and fun recipe to make, and the truffles/cake balls turned out really well. Hubby says they taste like brownies. :) They would be really cute to give as gifts - Bakerella puts them in mini-muffin cups, or in a little box like a box of chocolates and they're super cute! :)

When you're done, make sure to take some time to put your feet up and relax! :) Here's a favorite picture from today - Z loves to put his hands behind his head like this when he's relaxing with Daddy. :) He also says, "dis is cozy" when they're under the blanket together. :)