Carrot Cake Truffles
Our most successful new offering in 2010 was our cake truffles, spawned entirely from leftovers. We had once served slices of cake to order, but after hemming and hawing with our endearing staff of counter employees over the correct way to slice and serve a multilayered cake, we decided to get smart. Helen and Leslie were the catalyst behind convincing me to make cake truffles with all of our leftover cake and cake layering scraps. Now, instead of committing to a whole slice of cake, you can get a bite or two or three. You can choose to follow the recipe, or get crazy, without our guidance, using leftovers to concoct your own. Don’t limit yourself to carrot cake; you can use any cake scrap and any leftover fillings, crumbs, or crunches. Chocolate Chip Cake (page 94) scraps with Fudge Sauce (page 136) and ground Peanut Brittle (page 169) couldn’t be anything but a success.
Recipe information
Yield
Makes twelve to fifteen 30g (1 ounce) balls
Ingredients
Preparation
Step 1
Combine the carrot cake scraps and 25 g (2 tablespoons) liquid cheesecake in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and paddle until moist enough to knead into a ball. If it is not moist enough to do so, add up to 25 g (2 tablespoons) more liquid cheesecake and knead it in.
Step 2
Using a soup spoon, portion out 12 even balls, each half the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Roll each one between the palms of your hands to shape and smooth it into a round sphere.
Step 3
Put the ground milk crumbs in a medium bowl. With latex gloves on, put 2 tablespoons of the white chocolate in the palm of your hand and roll each ball between your palms, coating it in a thin layer of melted chocolate; add more chocolate as needed.
Step 4
Put 3 or 4 chocolate-covered balls at a time into the bowl of milk crumbs. Immediately toss them with the crumbs to coat, before the chocolate shell sets and no longer acts as a glue (if this happens, just coat the ball in another thin layer of melted chocolate).
Step 5
Refrigerate for at least 5 minutes to fully set the chocolate shells before eating or storing. In an airtight container, the truffles will keep for up to 1 week in the fridge.
The basics for cake truffles are as follows
Step 6
The base: Cake scraps, the fresher the better. We stick to one flavor of cake scraps at a time.
Step 7
The binder: This can be the additional milky soak from a cake assembly or a moist filling, curd, or sauce. Depending on the moistness of the cake base, we use more or less binder. We have recipes, but there is always a range for the binder.
Step 8
The shell: To seal in freshness and flavor, we roll each truffle in melted chocolate. The melted chocolate also serves to glue the crunchy coat onto the outside. We use Valrhona 72% dark chocolate or white chocolate, depending on the flavor of the cake truffle.
Step 9
The crunchy coat: Finely ground crumbs or crunches work best, but we’ve even been known to use toasted yellow cake crumbs.
Note
Step 10
Steps 3 and 4 are easiest when you have a buddy: one person coats the cake balls in melted chocolate, the other tosses them in the milk crumbs.
