Cake Bites

I stumbled upon this recipe while reading another baking blog and thought I’d try it out. I adore bite sized treats because you get to indulge, but not really feel badly about it. The thing that really drew me in to try these was the thought of using my cake scraps to make them in the future. My daughter’s 4th birthday is coming up and I’ll be making a princess castle cake – which I’m sure will have LOTS of scraps after carving. The other great thing is that you could make this with any flavor cake/frosting. I’m thinking they’d be really delicious as a spice cupcake bite. Usually I’m a “make it from scratch or don’t bother” baker, but for today, I just used some boxed mixes to give them a try. I’ll admit, I felt like a cheater-baker with the boxed mixes…totally not my style, but didn’t feel like making a scratch cake only to crumble the whole thing up into a bowl.

1 box  cake mix (cook as directed on box for 13 X 9 cake)
1 can cream cheese frosting (16 oz.)
1 package chocolate bark (regular or white chocolate)
wax paper

1. After cake is cooked and cooled completely, crumble into large bowl. (Woo-hoo! Playing with food!)
2. Mix thoroughly with 1 can cream cheese frosting.
3. Roll mixture into quarter size balls and lay on cookie sheet. (Should make 45-50.)
4. Chill for several hours. (You can speed this up by putting in the freezer.)
5. Melt chocolate in microwave per directions on package.
6. Roll balls in chocolate and lay on wax paper until firm.

Now, this is a totally simple recipe – rolling the balls out is a little time consuming, but the recipe itself is pretty much foolproof. But the dipping? That was a different story. I make lots of treats that require dipping and I’ve never had any trouble before. I used the two fork method. Drop, cover in chocolate, pick up with a fork, tap off excess then use a second fork to slide onto wax paper. The problem with these little bites was the cake crumbed a little, even though I’d chilled them overnight. I had to wipe my forks clean frequently to keep the crumbs out of the bowl of melted chocolate.

I started my dipping by melting white chocolate and tinging my bowl with a little rose colored gel to get a nice pink…I thought the brown of my chocolate cake would be adorable with a pink shell. But I realized very quickly that the pink wasn’t going to stay pretty long, as brown crumbs started sneaking their way into my bowl. So, I switched over to regular milk chocolate, which worked better – but still was more arduous than my usual dipping as I had to keep a close watch on the forks and the bowl for errant crumbs. I ended up using the extra pink and regular chocolate to make pretty contrasting stripes on the finished bites (spooned the chocolate into ziplock baggies and snipped off the end)- so it worked out ok, but I’m freezing the remaining 20 or so un-dipped bites to see if that helps any. I’ll let you know.

They were worth the effort though. Like a little bite of heaven. Even my daughter, who typically does not like sweets, did her little happy dance while eating one.