Dessert a la South Park

We had my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and of course baby Jake, over for dinner last night.  My sister has never seen the place so we used that as an excuse, but truthfully I just wanted Aaron to make homemade gnocchi again.  Although this time, I skipped the eggplant meatballs, opting for a Beet Salad instead. 

But, apparently I have an obsession with circular food and instead of main coursing it, I volunteered to prepare dessert after stumbling across Cake Balls from the website Bakerella.  And yes, I did spend the entire prep time thinking about this guy:

www.southparkstudios.com

Anyway, I chose not to go with red velvet, but to do chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and dark chocolate chips for the shell.

 

It's pretty easy actually.  You just bake the cake according to the box instructions.  After letting it cool for a bit, just use a fork to get it all out of the pan (it's all going to get crumbled up anyway)

 

Once it's all in the bowl, crumble the heck out if it.

 Then mix in the entire can of frosting.

"Clean off spatula and remainder of carton with tongue" was not an official step in the recipe, but I believe in improvising so go ahead.

Mmm, now it resembles sickly ground beef.  Which I'm sure wouldn't have been the case had I actually used Red Velvet cake mix and not chocolate.  But, I digress.  Now, I should have let this cool down much more before attempting to roll this stuff into balls, but I was running short on time so after failing at using my hands (it was way too sticky, it looked like I had cake gloves on....mmm....cake gloves), I decided an ice cream scooper was the way to go and ended up with various rock shaped blobs.

I popped them in the freezer at this point while Aaron made the gnocchi, bringing them out about 20 minutes later while they were still soft enough to form them into a more recognizable ball shape.

I then melted the chips in a small pan over low flame.  The initial plan of attack was going to be to dunk them.  But, it turns out that one bag of those chips is not quite enough to get the job done (definitely pick up 2 if you're going to be doing this to get the proper fully encased outer shell).  So instead Aaron improvised a drizzle technique for me:

My first instinct when we decided drizzling was the way to go was to just grab the spoon out of the pan and bring it over to the cakes.  This resulting in me decorating the counters and stove and Aaron laughing and pointing.  At that point, drizzling duties were turned over to Smarty Pants and we were on our way.

Now be forewarned, I intentionally tried to cut back on sweetness of these because I'm not a big fan of overly sweet.  However the 'sweet' factor was unintentionally replaced with the 'rich' factor.  Seriously, these are about one per person.  Ok, maybe two after taking a breather.

Definitely a fun recipe with a ton of options, just give yourself enough time to prepare them and make sure you have more than 5 people prepared to eat an entire cake.  Now, just for good measure, let's take a look at Jake and Ric spending quality time together at the table: