Christmas Cake Truffles!

Just spent a lovely evening with some of my wonderful friends, old and new, learning how to make Christmas Cake Truffles, that can also be turned into cake pops, with the lovely Jo from Peek-A-Boo Cakes, organised by Make Horsham as part of their Homemade Christmas workshop sessions. These evenings are always great fun and everyone is made to feel so welcome, whatever their ability level. Giggles (and tonight delicious cookies which I need to get the recipe for) are had by all and you come away having learnt a new skill in a fun and friendly environment!

I initially thought these would be really hard to do, but Jo broke it down into easy to manage steps and apart from my disastrous bauble, I am really pleased with mine (even my snowman that looks like he came from the Nightmare Before Christmas)! To make cake truffles/cake pops, crumbs of cake (home baked, shop bought, new, stale- all work great) are mixed with buttercream until they can be rolled into balls. The proccess caused lots of giggles, see the picture below and make of it what you will! I can't imagine what they found so funny!

 

Each of the cake truffles had a different Christmas design and we used coloured fondant icing to make all the decorations for these. Luckily, Jo showed us exactly what we needed to make and then we could embellish them, seeing who could make the best fluffy wings, sitting with several artists meant I did not win this one but still think my robin looks really cute!  The cake balls (and one hat shape for ours) were then dipped in delicious melted chocolate which unfortunately got on my hands so I had to lick it off! We used milk, white and Candy Melts, which I had heard of but not used before to get the red for the hat! For anyone who is interested, Candy Melts come from America and are Candy Melts by Wilton are colourful candy coatings with the same consistency as chocolate and unless flavoured, taste like white chocolate to me. They don't need to be tempered so can just be melted and are ready to go. 

 

 

The Candy Melts were trickier to work with and I defiantely need much more practice to get a smooth finish on mine! My favourite two have to be my robin and Christmas pudding...

They dry nice and quickly so you can peel them off the foil, knock off any spills and voila, lovely Christmas Cake truffles! Of course, I had to test them when I got home, and WOW, they are yummy but to be fair in the style of Joey, cake good, buttercream good, chocolate good! What's not to love!? I will defiantely be making some of these for Christmas pressies this year and with a bit of practice hopefully they will look even better! 

Thanks for a lovely evening!

xxx