Pumpkin Cake Balls Part 1 of 2

Yes, I am making a two-part cake balls post!  Have you heard of cake balls yet?  They are a truffle-cake-candy hybrid (confused?).  I discovered them recently on allrecipes.com because they kept winning the daily photo contests (LINK!).  Then a few months later, I stumbled upon Bakerella.com.  Her website is filled with fun pictures of her treats.  She pretty much made cake balls and cake pops famous, and has a fabulous book -- all because of her blog!  When I saw her Halloween Cake Pops post, I knew that I had to try them soon! 

 
I started making a couple different kinds of cake balls and cake pops, including some for Rachel's birthday party.  I've made the cake from scratch, I've made the cake part from boxed mixes.  Both result in delicious, moist cake with a crunchy candy coating on the outside.   When I started this blog, I decided that I would definitely make the Halloween cake balls I had been reading about for months now.  It helped that I saw this on newsstands for inspiration:

Here is how you make cake balls in a nutshell:

• Bake a cake (9" x 13")
• Crumble a cake
• Add frosting, mush together
• Roll into balls
• Dip the balls into hot melted candy chocolate and let harden

Since it is a lot of steps over a few days, I decided to go with an EASY, not-from-scratch recipe.  If I wanted to make this from scratch, I'd use the recipe in my Favorite Pumpkin Bread post.  I decided on this Duncan Hines recipe: http://duncanhines.com/recipes/cakes/dh/spice-pumpkin-cake .

Here we go!

Ingredients

• 1 package Duncan Hines® Moist Deluxe® Spice Cake Mix (I used Betty Crocker because our supermarket didn't have Duncan Hines Spice)
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup canned pumpkin

STEP ONE: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Mix everything together and bake for 30 minutes.  Allow it to cool fully on a wire rack.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients.

Beat with wire whisk, hand mixer or stand mixer.

Bake and cool.

STEP TWO: Cut off any hard edges and dispose how you see fit.  Crumble the cake.  If you really want to, make it even more fine by running through a food processor.

STEP THREE: Add almost an entire tub of cream cheese frosting to your crumbles and mush together.  I've done this two ways: by hand and with my mixer.  Both work well, but the mixer is easier and cleaner.

It doesn't look very appetizing at this point, I know!

STEP FOUR: Roll into balls onto a cookie sheet covered with waxed paper.  Then cover with plastic wrap and tin foil and pop into the freezer until you are ready to decorate.  Note: Wash your hands frequently so that rolling goes smoothly.  Cake will accumulate on your palms.

Yield: About 50 bite-sized balls.

My thoughts on the cake recipe: It is good and REALLY easy, but it doesn't have a lot of pumpkin flavor...  It mostly tasted like spice cake.  When I make these again, I would like to try a different recipe or make easy pumpkin bread from scratch and crumble that up.  I think that would work well.


STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 - The fun part: decorating!

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