Chocolate Raspberry Cake Balls

Hi everyone! It's Maggie!

I think long, long ago someone tagged me to include a recipe of my favorite messy meal. Well...basically everything I do in the kitchen leaves a path of destruction, but today I discovered THE MESSIEST DESSERT EVER! But It's so good that it's totally worth it.

I call these cake balls.

you'll need:
A chocolate cake mix
3 eggs
apple sauce
1/2 can of chocolate frosting
a package of fresh raspberries
a bag of milk chocolate chips

First you bake a chocolate cake using the lowfat directions. The cake mix I used called for a cup of water, 3 eggs, and 1/3 cup applesauce. Bake and cool.

Next scoop 1/2 a can of chocolate frosting in a large bowl and add about a 1/3 of a cup of applesauce. Mix in about 3/4 a package of raspberries. Using a hand mixer on the lowest speed, mix the ingredients until they are blended. The raspberries will be chunky.

Now's the FUN part! When the cake is cool, cut it up into large pieces and dump them a few pieces at a time into the large bowl with the frosting mixture. Use a hand mixer to blend everything together. The consistency should be very moist but the mixture should hold together enough to hand-form balls.

Line a cookie sheet with wax paper. Using a spoon, scoop up the "dough" and shape it into small bite-sized balls (kind of the size of a donut hole) with the palms of your hands. Place the balls on the wax paper. You can place the balls fairly close together on the wax paper but just not touching.

When all the dough has been formed into balls and placed on the wax paper. Put in fridge for about 1 hour to cool and firm.

After cooling, pour 1 package of milk chocolate chips into a small saucepan (the smaller the better because you want it to be deep enough to dip the balls in the melted chocolate). Melt the chocolate on very low temperature. Add a little milk if you think you need more moisture. Once melted, hand-dip each ball into the chocolate so it is completely coated. You can also pour spoonfuls of the melted chocolate over the ball while holding it over the melted chocolate. Be careful to not burn yourself if the chocolate is too hot, because throughout this process your fingers will be absolutely covered in the melted chocolate!

Place each chocolate covered ball back on the wax-papered cookie sheet and when all the balls are covered in chocolate, be sure to lick all the remaining chocolate off your fingers!!! :) Place the cookie sheet back in the fridge for another hour or so to chill before serving.

Serve chilled on a plate garnished with the leftover fresh raspberries.

In this recipe I cut back on the fat by using the lowfat baking method, plus cutting back on the frosting by adding applesauce. The result is still a delicious moist chocolate and raspberry flavor. You can probably see that this recipe is very alterable. You could use any cake mix flavor or frosting flavor and could use white chocolate to cover the balls if you want. You could also add different fruit flavors. I'm serving these ToNigHt at a dessert party so I'll let you know how they go!

Miss you all!
Maggie