Also, How (Not) To Take Pictures Of (Not) Making Cake Balls

So I made cake balls for the Very Curry Christmas on Saturday. It was interesting… and by interesting, I mean that it didn't quite work the way I planned. I was inspired by both Sugar Duchess' Oreo Pops and Bakerella's… everything! The recipe is really easy—a cooked box cake and a can of frosting, some lollypop sticks, and candy coating (such as almond bark). Here's how you can have the same experience I had…

First, you defrost a fail-cake* from the freezer. You have no idea what the equivalent is to boxes of cake, so just grab an amount that looks good and crumble up the cake:

_{*a fail cake is a cake that you tried to bake, but it fell apart and was too delicious to throw away}

Ok, not too bad, even if the image is a little dark…

Then, you notice that there's fried rice on the counter:

I guess it's the simultaneous blessing and curse of having weirdo-color-pattern counters like I do. From a normal vantage point, you can barely tell!

Then, you add the frosting to the cake crumbles:

And try to mix it up with the fork, but it doesn't quite mix very well:

But, oops, you realize that you don't have any room in the freezer for the finalized cake balls:

So you shift some stuff around. Ta-da!

Utensils didn't mix well, it had to be time to get your hands messy eventually…

The next step is to form the balls. Lumpy, weird-looking balls. Hmmm… must be doing something wrong here…

But you can't really do much about it, because the goop keeps sticking to your hands! (And this even is a picture after a few hand scrapings, and do you have any idea how hard it is to wash one hand so you can take a picture of how dirty the other one is?)

Take the lollypop sticks…

And stick them in the balls. Hmmm… This looks like it might end up not being very structurally sound… Didn't you read something about dipping the sticks in melted chocolate before putting them in the cake? But you don't really want to melt chocolate now AND when they're dipped, so we'll just skip that step.

And then stick them in the freezer for a couple days, until you get around to dipping them! I'm sure they'll turn out OK…

Not Pictured: Scorching half of the chocolate you have, balls falling off the sticks into the chocolate, balls falling off the sticks into the crushed peppermint coating, chocolate and peppermint coating dripping off the balls, remembering Bakerella's admonition to "tap tap tap tap tap" after dipping but still dripping chocolate off the balls, telling your husband he can eat the ugliest ones he can find, arranging them to be slightly attractive in a couple mugs, humidity or something making the coating sticky, popping them back in the fridge until right before people come, and FINALLY, enjoying a delicious cake ball. But then almost having to spit it in the trash because even though it's delicious, for some reason your body doesn't want sugar right now.

Oh, and forgetting to take a picture of the final product, and deciding a refrigerator-shot would work:

In retrospect, I realized that I was supposed to put the goop in the freezer for a bit before shaping the balls, and I think I was supposed to do the sticks and the dipping at about the same time. I'm not sure if I'll do this again… Maybe. Maybe if I know the right amount of cake. And maybe I won't use the "Whipped" frosting—I think that might have done weird consistency things to the mixture. We'll see…

_{I typed "balls" way too many times for the post to not be funny…}