Cake Ball Making

In celebration for someone's return back to the office, I am Dean of Treats (other people are doing cube decorations, etc.), with dark chocolate M&Ms being the theme and favorite candy of said person.

I've decided to work on my cake ball making skills (cake truffles if you wanna be fancy), and I've improved drastically since when I first started making these a few years ago. Mine used to be way too sweet when I followed previous recipes that insisted on incorporating a can of frosting, so I eliminated canned frosting completely for just my own mixture of cream cheese, butter, and minimal powdered sugar.

However, it's still seeming impossible to get more of a cake texture inside, and while my coating is better than prior years (I used to coat them really unevenly), it still looks very amateur. Of course, tacking on an M&M to anything doesn't exactly help in that area.


Too gooey looking inside (and I barely used any binder):


The successful things to do again were:
1) Use Alton Brown's red velvet cake recipe, weighing all ingredients--fantastic tasting, not too sweet
2) Use chocolate melting pot & tap off excess chocolate after rolling cake ball in it
3) Don't use canned frosting
4) Use minimal sugar in any binder

To try for the future:
1) Drying the cake out so it's less moist
2) Finding some kind of icing/candy writer to make a drizzle pattern