Over the weekend I made another batch of cake balls. For those who don't know, cake balls are gooey balls of cake dipped in chocolate. They're like truffles, but the ganache (yep, real word) is cake. In a word, they're awesome.
These weren't so awesome, because they're German Chocolate cake balls, which combine two things I dislike in desserts: nuts and coconut. Nuts I'm somewhat ambivalent to: they don't really add much to a dessert, and they only sometimes take away from my enjoyment of a dessert.
Coconut is the devil. We're talking shaved flakes of pure, concentrated evil. Even the smell is repulsing.
But anyway... this was my third batch of cake balls. I'd previously done chocolate in chocolate, and red velvet in white chocolate, but some of the ladies from work (who introduced me to the concept of cake balls at the Simply Delicious bakery) had begged me to try German Chocolate, so I decided just this once to make them.
By the way, I think this is the first thing I've ever made that I would not personally eat. I had to get Marci to taste test for me.
There was, however, a not-entirely unexpected side benefit. I ended up with a double boiler still fairly full of delicious, coconut-free chocolate coating.
My first choice was obvious:
After that, I had to start getting creative. I found a package of Jonathan's graham crackers:
Then Oreos: (I think Dad in particular would've been proud of that)
And Teddy Grahams:
I knew I had to stop when I started eyeing Jonathan's Vienna sausages, so I just tossed the remaining chopped pecans into the chocolate, stirred it around, and made some chocolate nut clusters:
I still hadn't used it all, and I'm not one to ever waste good chocolate, so I dumped it into the corner of my pan, thinking I wind up with nice chocolate chunk. Instead, it oozed over onto one of the cake balls, forever ruining it*.
I called that one a tar ball in honor of the BP oil disaster.
*by "it", I of course mean the remaining chocolate. The cake ball was already ruined by the mere fact of containing coconut.