Basic Cake Balls

While having to stay out of my house yesterday due to the cleaning lady taking forever to clean our house, I decided to wander around Target. I soon found myself in the cookbook section and the next thing I knew I was buying two new cookbooks. One such book was Cake Pops by Bakerella. Everything I saw in the book looked so cute! Good thing I started with the basics because it's harder than it looks, but I look forward to getting better and trying a lot of the recipes!

Yield: 48 cake pops * Price: ~ $15 * Calories: you don't want to know :)

Ingredients
18.25-ounce box cake mix (I used red velvet)
16-ounce container ready-made frosting (I used cream cheese)
32 ounces (2 pounds) candy coating (I used chocolate almond bark)

Directions
1. Bake the cake as directed on the box, using a 9-by-13-inch  cake pan. Let cool completely.
2. Crumble the cooled cake into a large mixing bowl. You should not see any large pieces of cake.
3. Add three-quarters of the container of frosting. Mix it into the crumbled cake, using the back of a large metal spoon, until throughly combined.
4. The mixture should be moist enough to roll into 1 1/2-inch balls and still hold a round shape. After rolling the cake balls by hand, place them on a wax paper-covered baking sheet.
5. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for several hours in the refrigerator, or place in the freezer for about 15 minutes. You want the balls to be firm but not frozen.
6. Melt the candy coating, following the intrustions on the package.
7. Place one ball at a time into the bowl of candy coating. Lift out the cake ball with your spoon.
8. Transfer the coated cake ball to the second wax paper-covered backing sheet to dry.
9. Repeat with remaining cake balls and let dry completely.

Thoughts:
It was hard to make the balls stay perfectly round after coating with the chocolate. I think I have a few ideas on maybe fixing that though. I thought the cake balls were really sweet. It might just be that I think red velvet cake is really sweet and adding the chocolate flavor made it extra sweet. I look forward to expirementing more with the recipes and giving my own tweeks to them.