Thursday, February 2, 2012

What to do with leftover cake?





If you saw my layered cake from last month, you may have realized that all of that chocolate and vanilla deliciousness left me with an entire leftover cake. I contemplated eating the leftovers (the obvious idea, perhaps??), but decided to put it in the freezer and save it for the weekend. My neighborhood friends and I held a "Mamatomo Shinnenkai"!! Basically it was an excuse for my mama friends and I to get together on a weekend and have a little party with as few kids running around as possible (three kids ended up coming, but two were under one, so it was pretty calm).

My contribution to the party made great use of the leftover cake via a transformation to cake balls!! Wahoo!! This was my introduction into Bakerella's world. I don't know why it took me so long to sack up and try these! They are way easy and can be done in so many adorable ways.

All you do is bake a cake, crumble it up, mix in some buttercream, make balls and coat them in melted chocolate. Dead easy. And delicious.




On Bakerella's site she has an actual recipe, but I didn't use it. She calls for a can of frosting which we don't have here. She lists the weight, but given that the moistness of my cakes were completely different I figured that I'd need different amounts of frosting anyway, so I just eyeballed it. The chocolate cake needed maybe two tablespoons of frosting, but the vanilla needed quite a bit more. I also used regular chocolate (not candy melts - good luck finding those here) and added a tiny bit of oil to keep the chocolate smooth.



I was toying with making cake pops, but couldn't seem to find lollipop sticks (as you may have suspected, candy making is NOT big here) and thought that styrofoam might be challenging to source as well. Perhaps in the future I could use that green foam stuff people use for flower arranging??

Regardless, they were simple and delicious. The party was a lot of fun. In addition to cake balls, I brought the Monster Cookies I'd made earlier in the week and a liter of White Russians (in a Nalgene - I'm classy like that). Wahoo!!




While Kahlua Milk is a fairly standard drink at the bars in Japan, the addition of vodka seemed to be a new thing to everyone. I only added one cup of vodka to one and a half cups of both Kahlua and milk (instead of the standard 1:1:1) to weaken it a bit. Most thought it was quite lovely, but one of the mama friends couldn't finish hers.

It was lovely to have an afternoon to chill with my mama friends. It was the first time for us to hang out without too many of the little ones needing our attention. Without kids, the conversation took on a different, funny tone! Hopefully we can do it again soon.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

2 comments:

  1. Those look fab lady! Unfortunately, where I come from leftover cake is an oxymoron. ;-)

    Would yakitori sticks work for future cake-poping?

    And finally, a litre of White Russians is a wonderful thing regardless of the container you put it in. xxx

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  2. It took all I had to not just eat the cake. But, knowing I had this coming up was good incentive for some restraint.

    I actually bought yakitori sticks, but I got worried aboutthe weight and also since they are quite thin and sharp I was wondering if they'd end up spearing the cake ball. I'll give it a go some other time and see what happens. Maybe for our next girls' lunch??

    I agree!! A liter of White Russians was awesome. We finished nearly all of it, so that was good.

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