The Cake Ball
You begin by baking a 9 x 13 cake pan according to directions. Let it cool for several hours or overnight. Then you crumble the cake in a large bowl. Then you dump in one cup of icing and stir the mixture together. Slowly but surely, the icing will totally incorporate into the cake and the mixture will be totally uniform in color.
Grab pinches of cake and roll them into balls.
Then: IMPORTANT! You place the cake balls into the fridge for a couple of hours OR into the freezer for a little while. You want them to be nice and firm. Not frozen solid, but not mushy.
Now, just before you pull them out of the fridge/freezer, you need to melt your Merckens chocolate. Just pop some wafers into a microwave-safe bowl and heat for 30 seconds the first time, stirring after each 15-second increment after that.
You can also melt the chocolate on a double boiler. The key when you’re melting the chocolate is to begin using it just after it fully melts and not to continue heating it. Under constant heat, it can dry out or clump up. Take it off the burner to melt your chocolate.
Once it’s thoroughly melted, just plop the cake ball right into the chocolate. (Or if you put them on a lollipop stick, it will be easier to dip.) Since it’s cold and firm, it should hold its shape and not crumble. Notice that you’ll want the melted chocolate to be deep enough in the bowl to allow the cake ball to be almost submerged. So tall, deep bowls are better then wide, shallow bowls.
Carefully transfer the cake balls to a sheet of waxed paper and allow the chocolate to set, which usually doesn’t take much time at all.
Neat trick: if too much chocolate pools around the bottom of the ball, just take a toothpick and score a line around the base of the ball. When it’s dry, the cake ball will separate from the extra pooled chocolate.
This the sweet and frilly and fancy part. When the candy coating is set (no longer wet and glossy), heat up the chocolate again and drizzle it over the top of the cake ball. (Bakerella used a squeeze bottle, but you can also just drizzle with a spoon.)
Just imagine the endless possibilities! White chocolate coating with chocolate drizzles, or vice versa. Pink coating with chocolate drizzles, pink coating with blue drizzles, yellow coating with white drizzles…the combinations are endless, not to mention how many ways you can alter the cake flavor inside.