It’s funny how everybody sort of trends on the same foods at the same time. It’s the edible version of middle school, everybody wanting to do what everybody else is doing, eating only vegan, or gluten free, or raw, or whatever the latest craze is.
I remember when it was cupcakes. Then whoopee (whoopie?) pies. Then bacon and chocolate. Now it’s balls. Meatballs, cake pops, you name it. People are crazy about balls.
So I figured I’d join the insanity. I mean, my favorite restaurant, after all, is The Meatball Shop in Williamsburg. Pretty flipping awesome. Just promise me if you ever visit NYC, you’ll make it a point to go to Brooklyn (it’s really not as scary as Law & Order: SVU makes it seem) and eat meatballs. You. will. thank me.
When downtime finds me at the restaurant, which isn’t often, granted, I try to come up with our next big thing that we can use as a special. I’m trying to make a good impression, after all. Last night I was working with financier molds (silicone molds for baking browned-butter French mini-cakes called financiers), chocolate cake batter, semi-sweet chocolate baking sticks, a brown-sugar steelcut oat granola I made last week, roasted, chopped hazelnuts, and black lava salt.
Black lava salt?!?! Crazy, right? It’s a sea salt that has added active charcoal, so while it still tastes really similar to Fleur De Sel, it’s pitch black. And how cool is that?
Is this sounding like an episode of Chopped yet?
Here was my plan: Bake miniature chocolate cakes in the financier molds, that would have the semisweet chocolate stick as the center, and on the top, just under the cake’s surface, would be the granola and black finishing salt for an added layer of flavor.
It failed. Or maybe what I should say is, it failed in how I thought it would turn out. The cake was so moist that when I tried to unmold it, it just fell apart.
So then I found myself figuring out a way I could use the cake pieces that didn’t totally waste the time I spent exploring menu options for the restaurant.
What followed was nothing short of mad science mixed with a little bit of preschool arts&crafts time.
I grabbed a work bowl, threw the scraps, the melted chocolate stick centers, the granola, the finishing salt, and roasted hazelnuts into a bowl, and started mixing. I got in there with my hands, making sure that all the scraps were completely turned to an edible, chocolatey, hazelnutty, play-doh.
I took the mixture, balled it up and rolled it in multicolored sanding sugar that we had laying around the restaurant (you can find it at most specialty food stores, maybe at Michael’s or some place like it) and took them home to the delight of my roommates.
The cool part about this recipe is that you can make it with a boxed cake mix, half a container of store-bought frosting, and whatever kind of sprinkles or large-grain sugar you can find.
Just slightly underbake the cake so it’s still moist and mix it with the frosting with your hands (don’t be afraid to use them! They’re your best tools in the kitchen!) and shape them into individual balls for serving.
Really, giving these as a gift, serving them at a party, people love them. And if you add extra ingredients like I did (granola, hazelnuts, finishing salt) it’ll add that many layers of flavor and they’ll go from good to oh-my-gosh-I-have-to-unbutton-my-pants-because-I-ate-so-many.
And let this serve as a reminder, even when your recipes don’t turn out exactly as you planned, change how you look at it, you could have an accidentally awesome dessert on your hands without even knowing it.
