{recipe} Lemon Raspberry White Chocolate Cake Balls

This morning, I received the following email in my inbox from reader Chris:

Dear Karen,

I put your foodgawker entry for lemon raspberry white chocolate cake balls on my “favorites” list.  That is such an ingenious recipe.  I clicked on it tonight because I wanted to make them, and-screeeeeee!!!!!  It was gone! I tried to find out the date that you posted the recipe so that I could look it up in your archives, but was unable to get the date.  May I please have a copy of that recipe, pretty please?

This happens sometimes, because I changed my web hosting and gave the site a grand makeover, and I didn’t move over all the recipes from the old, ugly version of this site. If you have a recipe you can’t find please let me know via email and I’ll be happy to post it for you!

Chris: ENJOY  this recipe from the archives, and please let us know how your cake balls turn out!

******************

After making my little lemon cakes last weekend, I had essentially the equivalent of an 8-inch square cake all in pieces in a bowl. After googling the term “cake scraps recipe” I came across Bakerella’s Red Velvet Cake Balls and thought, hmmmm… intriguing. The concept: smoosh together cake and frosting, form it into a ball, and coat it in chocolate. I decided to dig in and take the risk, and came up with this concoction by using equal parts of inspiration, ingenuity and overconfidence. Often that combination equals a failed dessert, some tears, and a huge mess, but luckily this time it all came together.

The only even remotely tricky part of this recipe is coating the balls with the white chocolate. Ideally the chocolate will be tempered so it will create a hard shell. There is a trick to doing that which I will explain in the recipe and which doesn’t require a thermometer or any gadget or device other than a spatula and some patience. Oh, and if you’re making something experimental, it never hurts to bust out the fancy garnishes- in this case, a dusty bottle of crystallized violets I brought back from Paris maybe 6 years ago, and had never used, and my trusty box o’ gold leaf. (I swear it’s a mystery, because as much as I use that stuff, it’s always a full box.)

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about whether these cake nuts cojones nads testicles balls would be worth the effort, but they were pretty fabulous! I’m not a huge white chocolate lover, but I knew it would work really well with the lemon as long as I balanced the sweetness of the white chocolate with a super lemony center marbled with some slightly tart raspberries. One guest predicted that “cake balls will be the new cupcakes.” You heard it here first.

Lemon Raspberry White Chocolate Cake Balls
This will make 20-30 balls depending on how big you make them. I got about 24 golf ball-sized balls out of my cake.

Ingredients:

• 1 8-inch lemon cake or equivalent (you can use this yummy recipe, but just make half of it and bake it in an 8- or 9-inch square or round pan)
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• zest of 2 lemons
• a couple handfuls of raspberries
• 12 oz. to 1 lb. good quality white chocolate (I used El Rey 34% pistoles from Whole Foods)

Method:

• In a mixer, combine cream cheese, sugar, and lemon zest until blended and frosting-like.
• Crumble cake into a bowl and mix with frosting. You will need to use your fingers to get them well-combined because it’s really almost impossible to get this mixed with a spoon.
• Add a couple handfuls of raspberries and smoosh them in with your hand, but don’t mix them all the way in because it looks cooler if it’s marbled.
• Roll into balls and put on a tray or cookie sheet. Put the tray into the freezer for about an hour.
• Now you have to temper the white chocolate. Put white chocolate pieces into top of a double boiler*. (if you are using chunk chocolate, chop it into smaller pieces first.)
• Heat water in bottom part of double boiler by itself, without the top part on it. When the water boils, turn it off. Then with the heat off, place the chocolate on top of the hot water.
• Stir chocolate with a spatula, scraping the sides, to melt it. Keep it over the water until the chocolate is about halfway melted. Then take the chocolate out of the water and put it on the counter (on top of a towel to stabilize it.)
• Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring… you get the idea. It will take awhile and you will think it won’t all melt but it will.
• The chocolate is ready for dipping when it’s melted but around 90 degrees. How do you check this? One part of your body that’s sensitive to temperature is the piece of skin just below the middle of your lower lip. So if you dip your finger into the chocolate and press it to the part under your lower lip, it should feel cold. If the chocolate is melty but feels cold when you do that, you are ready to dip. If it feels warm, keep stirring and testing.
• Once it’s to this point you have maybe 5 minutes to dip. For me this meant the chocolate in the bowl started getting hard after I had dipped about half of the balls, so I had to melt it in the water again and then remix and recool it for the second half of the balls. As I said, this is the only tricky part of the recipe.
• Put a ball into the chocolate and use a fork to prod it around then to lift it out. Shake off excess chocolate and put on a drying rack over a piece of parchment or another pan to harden. If you are garnishing do it before the chocolate sets.
• If you’ve tempered correctly, you can keep these out at room temperature for a good long while and they won’t fade, sweat, or melt. Don’t put them in the fridge or they’ll get watery condensation on them.

* If you don’t have a double boiler (I don’t!) you can use a pot and put the chocolate in a metal bowl to melt.