Leftover cake...what to do with it

Isn't it always the case that when you have a cake, whether it be birthday, anniversary or wedding, there is always leftovers and you are sick and tired of eating cake?  I get like that quite easily - I think it comes from having the last of six birthdays in the month of December and Christmas along with it - so when Mark and I ended up with a ton of wedding cake left over after our big day, I started to think about exactly what we were going to do with it.

Our wedding cake was a four tier cake made by my cousin and each layer was something different.  After the wedding was all done, we divided it up, wrapped some of it in tin foil, took the top layer and froze it in the freezer and put it aside for another day.  Last week I decided I wanted to do some baking and, while I had an idea of what to do with the cake, I was not exactly sure how to go about doing this.  A few years ago, the big thing was cupcakes...now it has become cake pops.  At the time, I was not a huge fan of the cupcake phase but when cake pops came along I loved the idea of it.  To me, it was just the right amount of cake to me and they could be decorated in a million different ways.  However, instead of doing cake pops, I thought "let's do mini cake bites".  You see, cake pops are made from scratch and baked in the oven and we already had baked cake to work with.  While I probably could add the cake pop stick, by doing mini cake bites, it removed the extra step and the number of extras I would have to pick up to make these.  You see, I regularly have baking chocolate and/or chocolate chips around the house.  I also had sprinkles and coloured sugars kicking around as well to decorate the coated cake bites with.  Everything I needed was in the house - I just needed the time to make them.

So, with all the ingredients ready and the cake completely thawed, I set about to make these mini cake bites.  The leftover cake I was using was a slab of marble pound cake that was 2" wide by 12" long and 4" high.  There was a layer of fondant icing surrounding it and there was a layer of filling halfway between the cake.  It had been in the freezer for several months so I let it take two days to thaw completely.  Once it was thawed, it was time to make the cake bites.  I piled the cake, breaking it down with my hands, into a mixing bowl and then mixed it all together so that it was one large helping of cake batter with the icing and filling

holding it all together. One thing I would recommend is using gloves when you are doing this - rolling the cake batter into balls can be quite messy and, since the icing on our cake was sprayed a bright blue colour, it prevented my counters from changing colours while I was working with the cake.  Depending on the size of the cake bites and the amount of leftover cake you are working with will determine how many mini cake bites you end up with.  In the end, we had 40 mini cake bites which I laid out on a parchment paper lined rimmed baking sheet to dry just a bit.  This should only take about 20 minutes.  What you are looking for is the outside of the cake pop being slightly hardened but still easy to squeeze.

Next step is to coat the cake bites in chocolate.  This time around, because we had dark chocolate in the house, I used a combination of 4 Dark Chocolate squares and half an open bag of dark chocolate chips.  When it comes to melting chocolate, you need to use indirect heat so I set up a water bath (bain marie) using my largest saucepan and a metal mixing bowl.  To get the chocolate squares to melt quickly, I took a

knife through them so that they were in small chunks or chards of chocolate.  At this point, set up another rimmed baking sheet but instead of the parchment paper, this time rest a wire baking rack inside the baking sheet.  This will allow any excess chocolate to drip down onto the sheet but not adhere the entire cake pop to the baking sheet.  Once I had the water in the saucepan up to a rolling boil, I lowered the temperature to a simmer and added the mixing bowl of chocolate to the top and, with a spatula, started moving the chocolate around until it melted completely.  I removed the mixing bowl from the water bath and then started coating the cake bites in chocolate.  Do this one by one so that when you are removing each coated cake bite from the chocolate, it is easy to remove excess chocolate.  Once you have finished coating each cake bite in chocolate and they are resting on the baking sheet, take the decorations (i.e. sprinkles, coloured sugar, etc) and start topping each cake bite as you want.  Have fun with this and, if you have kids around, get them to help out too.

Once you have decorated all of your cake pops, move them to another room to chill quickly so that the chocolate hardens.  If you have room in your fridge that works but, since I didn't have room there, I moved it to a room downstairs where it was colder than the main floor was.  It will only take 20 minutes for these to harden and then you can store them in an airtight container or cookie jar.