When Life Gives You Bad Cupcakes...

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I decided to make some cupcakes from scratch.  While I'm all for making my own cakes here at the house instead of buying them from a store, I do still surrender to using boxed cake mixes.  But I was in need of cupcakes to decorate and had no boxed-mix on hand, so I did an online search for a cake recipe that doesn't call for butter (because I didn't have that on hand either).  The recipe I came upon had a high rating and I actually had all of the ingredients here in the house, so I went for it.  That night after dinner, I gave each of the kids a cupcake as a treat.  They didn't go over very well.  The kids ate, at most, two bites and then walked away telling me they didn't like the muffins.  Hello!  They were cupcakes...how can you not like a cupcake.  And then I took a bite.  They were the densest, nastiest cupcakes I had ever tasted.  Great.  I had about 16 of them left.  So I decided to whip up a batch of butter cream frosting to put on them....try to mask the nastiness of the cupcakes.  Taste test 2 was a failure.  So now I had about 14 iced, nasty cupcakes left.  They sat there for about 2 days, cluttering the counter.  Finally, my husband asked me what I was going to do with them.  I was having trouble just throwing them away because it was good food going to waste.  His comment: "Too bad you can't reconstitute cupcakes."  And that's when it hit me...you can.....you can make cakeballs!  The next day Lizzie and hit the store for some canned chocolate frosting.  We mixed it together with the nasty, iced cupcakes and dipped them in white chocolate...and behold, the goodness of cake balls came into our house.

Our first attempt at them was not very attractive, but they tasted fantastic.  You wouldn't have had a clue that they were made with nasty "muffin" cupcakes if I hadn't told you.

Teacher Appreciation Week allowed for attempt 2 and these turned out much nicer.  We went with a vanilla cake/strawberry icing combo covered with chocolate.  They tasted just like chocolate covered strawberries!

Attempt 3 is waiting patiently in the freezer for a reason to make them...well that and I need to buy a set of dipping tools to see if this will help in making the coating look a little more uniform.