The Bauer Confidential

I’ve been lurking around a few on-line cooking communities for a few years now.  You see, I have a problem, an addiction really, I love to bake.  And I can judge that by the tightness in my jeans these past few days, this obsession is starting to take its toll.  So I’m officially on a diet, but before I started I finished all the sweets in the house so as not to be tempted by them (I know this sounds counter-productive, but you start diets your way, and I’ll start them mine).  Before cutting down on my baked goods, last week I had a particularly annoying day in lab (why is there one stupid, tiny, little box on the RT-PCR machine that you must click if you want it to actually record your data, why is it so darn small?), and what better way to recover than baking.  I’d bought a couple cake mixes and frostings on sale a few weeks back with the plan of making some cake truffles.  After seeing them made here, and then checking out Bakarella’s amazing creations, I thought I should give them a try.

So I baked up a Devil’s Food Cake, I took a picture of the cake because, though boring, it was a nice flat looking cake.  No it wasn’t attacked by a vampire, those two holes in the center are from testing it with toothpicks.

Once the cake has cooled, you tear it up.  You heard me right, you take that nice cake and demolish it.  It’s sort of cathartic.  This is what it looks like.

Then you mix in a can of frosting, I used cream-cheese (Bakarella’s favorite).  I tasted it at this stage and thought it was a little bland, so I added some mint extract.

I let it cool and then rolled it into balls, which I then put in the freezer.  I coated the balls with a mixture of 60% Cacoa Ghiradelli chips and Guittard mint chips (with a few vanilla melts thrown in to give it a nice consistency).  Here’s the final result.

They were pretty tasty and well recieved by my co-workers.  I honestly would prefer a nice piece of cake with frosting.  If I were going to do this again, I’d use a chocolate frosting with a chocolate cake because I think the cream-cheese frosting sort of diluted out the chocolate flavor.  I also used the whole can of frosting, which I think was a bit too much and the centers were really soft.  I doubt I’ll go to the trouble of making these again, unless I have a party or something where it would be fun to decorate.