Eat This: Birthday Cake Balls

Never made cake balls? They are ridiculously easy - so much so that even my six year-old can make them.

Start by preparing a box of French vanilla cake mix according to package directions. Reduce the cooled cake to crumbs in a bowl. (Here's where a six year-old with clean hands really comes in handy. The challenge: finding a six year-old with clean hands. If you are lucky enough to procure one with clean hands, odds are good that if you expose them to cake and frosting they will lick their fingers inside of thirty seconds - at which point, you must send them to the sink for the first of many times. That's many, MANY times - like possibly thirty seven, before all is said and done.)

Add one can of cream cheese icing to the cake crumbs and stir until combined. If you desire a more even texture, use an electric mixer. Refrigerate the "dough" for at least 2 hours before rolling into 1-inch balls. I generally freeze my balls (heh, heh - that's funny) on a parchment paper-covered cookie sheet for an hour before dipping them in coating. You can melt your coating (in this case, white candy bark) in a double boiler, but I use the microwave in 30 second increments, stirring between nuking.

Coating the balls is the only part that's actually challenging. You have to move fast, and a couple of forks or some chopsticks come in handy during the "dip and swirl" phase.

You need to refrigerate the finished cake balls for at least a few minutes so that the coating hardens, and I typically store mine in the fridge as well.

I would make these for my own upcoming birthday (this Friday - three shopping days left!), but I have it on good authority that I am getting a Nothing Bundt Cake cake. I hope that it is the lemon one. With the "signature" (cream cheese) frosting, not the totally lame and pointless drizzle. And I want a flower in the center. Preferably a pink one.

Honey, are you reading this?

This gets me thinking: you could use lemon cake mix, cream cheese frosting and white bark, and get a cake ball that, for all intents and purposes, would taste like my favorite NBC cake. (Actually, my FAVORITE favorite is the lemon raspberry, but that's seasonal - but you could swirl some raspberry puree through the cake ball dough?)

Hmm, I think a little experimenting is in order. I definitely would need to serve the finished products in a Bundt pan, just to be arch and ironic. And also because I like to use my Bundt pans for serving dishes. Weird, right? But that's a post for another time.