Cake Truffles

Cake truffles are the tiny, highly customizable treat perfect for your next party. White chocolate coats a cake and buttercream filled bite sized sweet!

For Father’s day this past weekend, my dad requested “orange cake with cream cheese frosting.”  This means he specifically wanted orange cake made from a mix.  I happened to have one in my cupboard.  Fast forward to Thursday before, I decide to bake my cake ahead of time, you know, actually be on the ball for once.  Nope.  The cake pretty much didn’t raise.  Why?  Don’t know, could have been any number of things.  Doesn’t really matter because I was stuck with a short, dense cake.

I went to 3 grocery stores and couldn’t find another orange cake mix.  Three stores!  Apparently orange is a seasonal item and this is not it’s season.  Well, what do I do now…?

Enter, cake balls.  Or cake truffles as I like to call them (feels fancy).

And they were a hit.  Especially with the under 10 crowd.

So remember, just because it looks like a flop, it doesn’t mean you can’t turn it into something lovely.

(Don’t worry, I had a nice little freak out.  I don’t take kitchen failure super smoothly, even though it happens ALL THE TIME).

Tips for Success:

I have always found cake truffles to be just a little trickier than what I think they should be.  Here are a few tips that I find useful through all of my trial and error.

• Use homemade buttercream.  Canned frosting that you buy in the store has ingredients in it intending to keep it soft.  But for success, we need these cake truffles to get really firm when we chill them, otherwise they fall apart when dipping them in chocolate.  For these, I used cream cheese buttercream, but I’ve also had excellent results with plain buttercream and chocolate buttercream.
• Use enough buttercream, but not too much.  That seems like an annoying tip, but hear me out.  You want enough buttercream for everything to stick together but not so much that they only taste like buttercream and are kind of a sticky mess.  I find that 2 cups of buttercream to 1 cake is about the perfect amount but the best way to tell is by adding some buttercream, stirring it up, and then try and roll a ball.  If it falls apart, you need more buttercream.
• Chill the cake truffles before dipping them in chocolate.  I suggest chilling them in the freezer for at least 30 minutes.  Sometimes I chill them overnight.  I like them to be nice and set so they don’t crumble apart in my melted chocolate.
• Use dipping chocolate, like Candy Melts or the Ghirardelli Melting Wafers rather than chocolate chips. The dipping chocolate is designed to get a hard shell where melted chocolate chips will always stay a little soft.
• Add some stripes in a contrasting color.  This step is totally optional, but it will wow your crowd, plus hide some of the lumps and bumps.  Double points if you do 2 colors of stripes.

If you like these cake truffles, you might want to try making brownie truffles, which are pretty much the same thing except loaded with chocolate!

Happy Baking!