Saturday, August 14, 2010

Ways to use up cake #1: Cake Truffles

Last week I made some mini carrot cakes to take in to work - via the potentially wasteful method of cutting the little cakes from a sheet cake using a cookie cutter. However, I know of at least a couple of awesome ways of using leftover cake, and I had an alternative use in mind for the leftovers here: cake truffles. This is a super easy way of making delicious wee treats - it works fantastically well with Tim-Tams and Toffeepops and doubtless many other things too, but today's version are carrot cake flavour.




Mine are simple, though. To make the truffles, crumble up your cake in a big bowl, add cream cheese, and mush it all together. If you want you can add extra flavours - I added a bit of extra cinnamon and nutmeg to this as I felt there wasn't enough in the cake itself. Then roll it into balls. Chill the balls for a while (an hour or more), because the next step is dipping them in chocolate and it sets nice and quickly if the stuff you're dipping is good and cold.

As an indication of quantities, I used about 350g of cream cheese for about 700g of cake (lots of truffles!) but it will vary depending on the consistency of your crumbs and the desired effect - I wanted them a bit more cream cheese-y because it plays out the carrot cake theme well but for such a moist cake I could have used less. So just keep adding it until you have enough to stick the crumbs together well.








Once you've rolled the balls and chilled/frozen them for a while, melt some chocolate melts (I zap them in the microwave in short bursts, watch it carefully to ensure it doesn't burn but it's much quicker than in a bowl over simmering water), then dip the balls individually into the chocolate, covering fully, and place on a sheet of baking paper (or a silicone baking sheet if you have one) to set. If you want to you can add decorations or toppings before they set - or even swirl some more melted chocolate of a different type (e.g. white if you used milk or dark to coat them, or vice versa) on the top. Or even sprinkle nuts or something on top. The world is your oyster!



And that's it. You can freeze them for a month or so, or keep chilled for up to two weeks. Best to keep them in the fridge, though, because of the cream cheese.

I tried one of these and am a bit disappointed - I expected them to be better than they are. Next time I will use cream cheese icing (i.e. add some icing sugar and lemon juice) instead of plain cream cheese - and I think maybe dark or milk chocolate would have been a better option. For some of the truffles I mixed some cinnamon through the white chocolate before dipping, but the cinnamon flavour is lost in the chocolate. I can vouch for Tim-Tam truffles being astonishingly tasty, though, and I'm sure with a bit of tweaking these would be excellent, too. Lesson for me: don't make experimental truffles after a big dinner when  you don't feel like tasting them during the making. ;-)



If you ever need inspiration to make these exceptionally cute, check out Bakerella - she excels at (and in fact has just written a book on) cake pops, which are these self-same treats, except on a stick and with disgustingly cute decorations in every fathomable theme.

6 comments:

  1. Yummy treats ... Thank you for letting us sample these scrumptious morsels.
    Neighbour man/lady

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  2. I did this once with a pineapple cake which didn't work out - it was really good, but a bit ridiculous with all these cake truffles sitting in my fridge...they disappeared fast. Carrot cake truffles sound good to me, sorry to hear they didn't blow you away, they certainly look mighty fine!

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  3. Hi, Just wondering what brand of chocolate you used?

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  4. Anon, it depends; if you want to make sure they set hard without fussing too much about the chocolate use chocolate melts from the baking aisle of the supermarket. I usually use chocolate I like to eat, though - Cadbury Dream is my favourite supermarket brand white chocolate, for example - which means you have to be careful not to heat the chocolate too much (heat it just barely enough to melt) and unless you temper it properly, which is pretty complicated (i.e. I wouldn't bother for these) they will stay a bit soft. Hope that helps!

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  5. Thank you - I used Nestle Melts in the end. Had a chocolate disaster when i used chocolate from the cake decorating shop!!

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