Lemon Raspberry White Chocolate Cake Balls

This will make 20-30 balls depending on how big you make them. I got about 24 golf ball-sized balls out of my cake.

Directions:

• 1 8-inch lemon cake or equivalent 
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• zest of 2 lemons
• a couple handfuls of raspberries
• 12 oz. to 1 lb. good quality white chocolate (I used El Rey 34% pistoles from Whole Foods)

Ingredients for Cake:

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 1 cups plain yogurt
• 1 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• zest of 2.5 lemons
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 of 3/4 cup vegetable oil

• Make the cake:

Preheat oven to 350.
Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and cardamom (actually important in this case to sift or you will get lumps.)
In a separate bowl, combine yogurt, 1 cups sugar, eggs, lemon zest, vanilla extract, and vegetable oil.
Add wet ingredients to dry and mix with a wooden spoon or whisk just until blended.
• Pour into 9x9 pan that's been sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake about 40 minutes, until golden on top and a toothpick comes out clean.


Cool 10 minutes and flip over onto a baking rack to cool.

Method:

• In a mixer, combine cream cheese, sugar, and lemon zest until blended and frosting-like.
• Crumble cake into a bowl and mix with frosting. You will need to use your fingers to get them well-combined because it’s really almost impossible to get this mixed with a spoon.
• Add a couple handfuls of raspberries and smoosh them in with your hand, but don’t mix them all the way in because it looks cooler if it’s marbled.
• Roll into balls and put on a tray or cookie sheet. Put the tray into the freezer for about an hour.
• Now you have to temper the white chocolate. Put white chocolate pieces into top of a double boiler*. (if you are using chunk chocolate, chop it into smaller pieces first.)
• Heat water in bottom part of double boiler by itself, without the top part on it. When the water boils, turn it off. Then with the heat off, place the chocolate on top of the hot water.
• Stir chocolate with a spatula, scraping the sides, to melt it. Keep it over the water until the chocolate is about halfway melted. Then take the chocolate out of the water and put it on the counter (on top of a towel to stabilize it.)
• Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring… you get the idea. It will take awhile and you will think it won’t all melt but it will.
• The chocolate is ready for dipping when it’s melted but around 90 degrees. How do you check this? One part of your body that’s sensitive to temperature is the piece of skin just below the middle of your lower lip. So if you dip your finger into the chocolate and press it to the part under your lower lip, it should feel cold. If the chocolate is melty but feels cold when you do that, you are ready to dip. If it feels warm, keep stirring and testing.
• Once it’s to this point you have maybe 5 minutes to dip. For me this meant the chocolate in the bowl started getting hard after I had dipped about half of the balls, so I had to melt it in the water again and then remix and recool it for the second half of the balls. As I said, this is the only tricky part of the recipe.
• Put a ball into the chocolate and use a fork to prod it around then to lift it out. Shake off excess chocolate and put on a drying rack over a piece of parchment or another pan to harden. If you are garnishing do it before the chocolate sets.
• If you’ve tempered correctly, you can keep these out at room temperature for a good long while and they won’t fade, sweat, or melt. Don’t put them in the fridge or they’ll get watery condensation on them.