For the next potluck I decided to make cupcakes that I've done before and have been quite well-received. They are chocolate Guinness cupcakes with a whiskey chocolate ganache filling and Bailey's Irish Cream frosting. The original recipe is from Smitten Kitchen and was adapted slightly by the Curious Domestic.
I prefer to ice my cupcakes with a generous swirl of frosting for an optimal icing to cake ratio, however this frosting is very sweet and a smaller swirl goes a long way.
Now the beauty of this recipe is that it leaves you with a few extra goodies to make another treat. The Curious Domestic uses the leftover cake from making the holes in the cupcakes for filling, and leftover ganache to make little 'truffles'. The leftover ingredients screamed 'cake balls!' to me. There has to be a more appealing name for these little confections of cake, frosting and chocolate. Henceforth in this post, they shall be referred to as 'cake sphere-lets', uh.. 'cake globes'...hmm...'cake crumblettes'..no...'cute spherical cakelets'....cake balls it is! I made cake balls once after a little cupcake project hiccup - they aren't my favourite thing to make with all the fuss of dipping things in melted chocolate (unless they are peppermint patties - have to stick that in so that my husband can sigh in relief) and I don't think I would ever bake a cake with the sole intention of crumbling it up and mashing it with icing, but they are a tasty use of cake scraps and leftover icing.
For these cake balls I had about 1 1/4 cup of cake crumbs and I mixed this with 2 tablespoons each of leftover chocolate ganache and Bailey's frosting. Now normally I would put this mixture into the fridge before rolling them into perfectly shaped little balls, but I had to get to a potluck so I made them into shapes loosely resembling balls before I left and placed them in the fridge to harden. To coat the cake balls, I melted 5 oz of semi-sweet chocolate in a small bowl over a pot of boiling water. I probably could have used more chocolate to make the dipping a bit easier but I did not want to use up that much chocolate for a leftovers treat. You want to dip quickly as the chocolate heats up the cake ball and the longer you roll the ball around in there, the higher the chance you may end up with cake crumb escapees ruining the smoothness of your chocolate. I decorated the cake balls (a little haphazardly) with some leftover frosting and voila! Chocolate, Guinness, whiskey and Bailey's cake balls!
