Cake Balls

I read about cake balls on Bakerella (which is amazing) and I wanted to try them. I was kind of pressed for time after making the oreo truffles, though, so I used canned icing and a cake mix for the cake. This pretty much means I have to make it again to do it from scratch.

I wanted to make carrot cake balls, but I only had baker's chocolate to make the outer shell, and I thought chocolate carrot cake would be weird. I planned to use vanilla instead and had even found some vanilla coating wafers online, but when I called Whole Foods to see if they carried them, I just confused the person I talked to ("I'm looking for melting chocolate...but vanilla?") so I gave up on that plan.

Instead, I decided to use banana cake for the center, and finish off the semisweet chocolate I had used for my oreo truffles.

Since I was rushing a little to get them done, I stuck the cake in the freezer to cool it before I crumbled it. In this picture, I'm about to mix it with canned cream cheese icing.

Little balls of cake! I don't think you can tell from the picture, but they're actually a lot bigger than the oreo truffles. I put them in the freezer for a while because the cake tends to fall apart when you dip it in chocolate unless it's frozen together.

Finished product! Sprinkles are so much fun.

And the inside.

Oreo Truffles

Last week I made oreo truffles! There's a basic recipe on the Kraft Foods website, which I used with some modification on the toppings.

We don't have a food processor, so I had to crush the oreos in a ziplock bag. I did them in batches and it took forever because I was trying to get them to crush really finely (I'm not sure now necessary this is, but I wanted them to have a nice texture). By the end, I had set the bag on the floor of the kitchen and was alternately jumping on it and beating it with a wooden spoon. Hopefully the people in 2W weren't home.

Oreos mixed with cream cheese. It's basically a delicious blob of chocolate.

The blob turned into 30 little chocolate balls.

Then I dipped them in melted baking chocolate and decorated the tops. For some reason, I don't have a good picture of the final product, but they were very attractive truffles if I do say so myself. I had a lot of fun decorating them with chocolate drizzle or oreo crumble or coconut.

I want to make this again, but I'm going to find someone with a food processor first. 

Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

These cookies don't need to be baked and require only seven ingredients: oats, sugar, milk, butter, cocoa, peanut butter, and vanilla. This recipe is particularly convenient for me because apparently we don't own any baking sheets. We discovered this last time we made cookies--General and I had mixed together all the ingredients before we even started looking for baking sheets, so we used whatever we could find, including cake and saute pans (hey, they worked).

Anyway, Debra and I made the cookies yesterday afternoon and they came out perfectly. And there may be only a few left now. Oops.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

I've finally decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon (although I've apparently had this blog since October 2008...?). I'll mainly be using this blog to chronicle and share my culinary adventures and experiments with you all.

Yesterday I made chocolate chip banana bread for the second time this summer. It's really because we keep buying more bananas than we can eat, and then they turn dark and I have no other choice. It's not like we love banana bread or anything. Not at all.

For this version, I used two overripe bananas and one perfect ripe one, a combination I really like. When you mash up the overripe bananas, they basically turn into gooey baby food, but the ripe one will become chunky, resulting in delicious banana chunks in the baked bread. You can find a decent banana bread recipe anywhere on the internet; it's pretty simple to make. I add a LOT of chocolate chips, but I've been told it's impossible to have too many, so there you have it.