Cake Balls & Santa Brownies

We had an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party at our apartment so I wanted to come up with a few little Christmasy desserts to have out.  I decided on cake balls & Santa hat brownies.  After all, nothing compliments Bud Light like a cake ball.

Let me preface all of these directions with the fact that I did not do a good job photographing my steps.  Some of the time there are good pictures; some of the time the pictures are pointless; and some of the time the pictures are missing altogether.  I apologize.  I'm still new at this blogging stuff!

So... cake balls.  You will bake a cake according to the directions on the box.  I used holiday funfetti.  Once the cake has cooled, put it into a bowl & mash it up.  You can use a spoon but I've found that using my hands is a whole lot more effective.  Mix the mashed up cake with about 3/4 of the container of frosting.  I used cream cheese frosting.  You want the mixture to be moist enough that they can be rolled into balls without falling apart.  Here are my finished balls:

Once they're all finished, place them in the freezer.  Next, you will work on the chocolate topping.  You'll need to use melting chocolate for this otherwise it'll be thick & lumpy.  I got red and green melting chocolate & Christmas sprinkles.  You will probably want to do all of one color first.  If you're crazy like me, you will make the same number of each so that they can be symmetrically placed on the plate.  Problems, I know.  

I have zero pictures of the next steps so I'll have to just type the directions.  Time to frost your balls.  Once the chocolate is melted, get the balls out of the freezer and dip them one by one into the chocolate.  I just used by fingers because I was able to get a much thinner coating of chocolate on them than when I used a lollipop stick.  

[I made snowmen cake pops that I'll write about next & I'll talk about tips for using lollipop sticks].

If you're going to be putting sprinkles on the cake balls, you'll need to do it right after you dip them in the chocolate because it hardens fairly quickly.  Michael's carries every color imaginable but you can also get white & dye it your own color.  The decorating possibilities are endless!

In November, I made turkey cake pops:

The turkey cake pops were a big hit... and by big hit I mean that my friends didn't make fun of me as much as I had anticipated.  So, instead of stopping there, I decided to make snowmen cake pops for our Christmas party.  If one was good, two must be better!

Here are the supplies for the snowmen:

I wanted the snowman heads to be smoother than the red & green ones I had just done so I decided to use lollipop sticks to dip them, even though it meant a thicker chocolate coating.  Here is a tip I've learned: if you put a bit of chocolate on the stick, place it in the cake ball (about half way through the ball) then pop them in the freezer for 5 minutes, the stick doesn't pull through the cake ball.  It's a lot more stable and easy to handle this way.

I also like to use a coffee mug to melf the chocolate so that the area is deep and narrow.  It makes the dipping much easier.  One by one, dip the cake pops into the chocolate.  You may need to wait a bit, let the excess chocolate drip off & then let the chocolate harden before putting it back onto the plate.

Once they are all dipped & are hardening on the plate, you can assemble the hats.  First I split the oreos & scraped the cream from the middle.  One half of the oreo is the brim of his hat.  Then I took the mini oreos & used a toothpick to scrape around the edges because the cream gets brown from the cookie crumbs... and because I have problems.  I used a little bit of the melted chocolate to "glue" them together.

Next, take the sticks out of the cake balls so that you can attach the hats.  Spread some of the melted chocolate on the top of the cake ball and press the hat into it.  Place it back on the plate and it'll harden together within minutes.

Next comes his carrot nose.  For this, I used rainbow chip sprinkles but you can really use anything that is small and orange.  Just take put some of the melted chocolate on the tip of a toothpick then press the nose into the hardened shell.  You'll want to hold it on there for a few seconds to make sure it attaches.

For the eyes I used an edible pen.  But you could certainly dip a toothpick into brown or black chocolate and make his eyes & mouth that way as well.  I think they turned out to be pretty cute!

Lastly, I made Santa hat brownies.  I found this idea on Pinterest & I must say, they looked much cuter there than they did when I made them! 

For these I just baked brownies from a box, cut them with a tiny circle cookie cutter, attached a strawberry and decorated them to look like Santa's hat.  They were kind of wilty looking at the beginning and were veryyy wilty looking by the end of the night.  But they tasted delicious.  And how cute is that plate?!  :)