Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Cake Balls Part I & an Update

Good news! The plumber only had to replace the thermal coupler thingy and not the whole hot water heater. And yes, thingy is an official word. In my world at least. So instead of having to pay several hundred dollars on a new one plus labor. It cost a whole $100.

Gigantic sigh of relief.

On to the balls (Please save all of the 12 yr old boy giggles for the end or you may never get through this post).

Baking the cake was a breeze. Just mix it up and pour it into the pan and bake. Molly likes to say "I want to pop the eggs", but then she freaks out and says "No Mommy, you pop the eggs". Yes, she is adorable but thank you for saying so.

Then I had to wait until the cake was cool before the next step so to pass the time I made spaghetti for dinner and washed dishes. In my little Fibromyalgia world, if I sit down, I'm done. So I had to stay on my feet for several hours which always makes for a rough night of sleeping and a sore body the next day.

After the cake was completely cool, I crumbled it up using 2 forks. This took longer than I had anticipated. It's soft cake, how long could it possibly take? *sigh* The next step was to add a container of cream cheese frosting and mix it all up. That was kind of fun, the cake was this huge glob like mass. Awesome!

I put a layer of wax paper on a baking sheet, then I started scooping up cake and forming it into balls. My balls were not the same size. Some were large, some were small and some were misshapen. Talk about odd balls. I had to get out a measuring spoon so I could measure my balls. What I was looking for was a nice consistent quarter size, perfectly round ball. Not too big because then my balls would sag. They needed to be nice and firm because it will be hard to finish them if I had squishy balls.

About every 5th ball that I rolled I had to wash my hands because my balls kept sticking. I don't think I'm very fond of sticky balls. So what I thought would be a fairly quick process turned into a fairly long process because if I'm nothing else I am a ball perfectionist. My balls have to perfect. No second rate balls for me, no sir! I had 51 balls and then a mini-ball. Lin grabbed one of my balls and it broke in half so I added it to the mini-ball to make a full size ball.

So once all of my balls were perfect and round I shaped 20 of them into cones for Christmas Tree shaped cake balls. We'll see how that turns out. I'm not real hopeful at this point. I may just have to stick with the balls and not stray from the true intention of the recipe.

I covered my balls up real tight in plastic wrap and tossed my balls into the refrigerator. My balls will be nice and cold tonight when I get them out and decorate them. I am so looking forward to dipping my balls into melted chocolate. I love chocolate.

So that was my adventure last night, I will be sure to let you know how the decorating goes and I hope to post some pictures of my balls tomorrow.

Happy Hump Day

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