Carrot Cake Balls

I have made several flavors of cake balls with my favorite being the triple chocolate version (chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, and milk chocolate coating, but I had never tried carrot cake. Probably because I don't make carrot cake too often due to the work it takes to grate carrots. Even then I usually made Nathan do it, but I have eliminated the work. 2 words...food processor. I bought one last spring, and it really makes grating carrots a breeze. So I made Nathan's traditional carrot cake with cream cheese icing for his birthday as well as trying some little carrot cake balls coated in white chocolate.

To start with you have to bake your cake and make some frosting. My recipes are as follows:

Carrot Cake

Ingredients

1 1/4 C oil
4 eggs
2 C sugar
3 C grated carrots
2 C flour
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t salt
2 t baking soda

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease 2 9 inch round pans.
Beat eggs, add oil and sugar.
Mix in dry ingredients.
Stir in carrots.
Pour in pans and bake 40-45 minutes.

Cream Cheese Icing

Ingredients

8 oz cream cheese, softened
1 stick butter, softened
1 lb powdered sugar
2 t vanilla

Mix cream cheese and butter. Add vanilla and powdered sugar.

Now that you have some cake and some icing we can move back to Cake Balls. Once you have your cake baked, warm but not so warm you can't handle it, crumble it into a bowl and mix in the icing. The warm cake melts the icing.

Refrigerate until cool (about 2 hours).

Make cake mixture into balls. I usually refrigerate after I make balls too because it starts melting as you work with it.

Dip in your selected coating. For the carrot cake I went with white chocolate. Excuse the messiness, I never claimed to be a candy maker (and never will)!

Nathan is a chocolate snob.

Refrigerate until hard. And enjoy!

The wonderful thing about cake balls is the ability to use whatever flavor combination you want. Just choose a cake flavor, icing flavor, and coating flavor and go. Usually I take the easy way and use a cake made from a box, icing in a can, and whatever chocolate I want on top. The amount of cake you get from a cake mix and the amount of icing in a store bought can just happen to be the right proportion for cake balls.

Another good thing about cake balls, everybody loves them, even if they don't like cake. The mixture forms more a a truffle consistency that is really rich and yummy!