I have a secret for you, not everything food-bloggers make turns out as intended.  99.9% of the time, you don’t see the result.  We just pretend that it never ever happened.  We find something else, or keep tweaking and re-making them until we get it JUST RIGHT.

Well, welcome to the .1% of the time that we will share our failure with you anyway.

Mostly because the only problem with these was aesthetic. And I was not willing to go through the cake ball effort all over again, no matter how much I love you guys.

I realize that these aren’t the prettiest cake balls, but sometimes things don’t come out 100% as planned.  Sometimes I have to improvise.  Since covering things in chocolate is easy enough, I naturally assumed that covering them in white chocolate would be just as easy.

I was wrong.

So,  here’s my tip:  When covering these spooky cake ball ghosts, DO NOT USE WHITE CHOCOLATE.  Because it will look like these.  Well, maybe not if you don’t give up as quickly as I do, but for me it just cooled too quickly and got all thick and goopy.  If you use “Candy Qwik” or just a white couverture they should turn out much better, but we do the best we can with what we have.  “WE” only had one bar of white chocolate, so that’s what “we” used.  Couverture will give you not only a smoother candy coating, but also less goopy runniness.

Let’s get back on track here.  Moral of the story:  if you know how to make cake balls, you can easily make GHOST cake balls.

Just shape your cake “ball” into a 1-1/2 to 2 inch cake “log”.  Try not to giggle when you realize what it looks like (it will be harder than you think)…

To make your cake “log”, connect your pointer finger to your thumb as shown in the beautiful artistic interpretation below:

Yes I have ugly man hands so I would prefer to draw what I was doing rather than show you. Get over it.

Holding the cake mixture so that most of it is cupped inside your hand, pat the exposed bottom of the log until it flattens.  Your fingers should have given the log a slight indentation while helping give it a level bottom.  Chill in refrigerator until ready to cover.

Tip #2: Make them in cake POP form v cake ball.  I didn’t have my lollipop sticks ready, so that wasn’t an option, but if you do… Dip the bottom of your ghost in your candy coating and then insert the stick.  Using a stick makes dipping easier, you just roll the ghost in the coating, then keep twisting it allowing excess coating to drip back into the bowl.  Stick into a foam block while it dries and hardens.

I totally intended to affix little eyeballs to these guys, but then I was so tired after wrestling with the white chocolate that I decided that I would try to write their expressions on with food-safe marker, and it wasn’t cooperating either.

Tip #3: Put adorable googly eyes on them. It will only take a few extra seconds (affix with either a dab of frosting or melted chocolate behind each eye).  Maybe a mini chocolate chip or just a dot of regular chocolate for the spooky ghost mouth.

I was so defeated that I gave up and didn’t even give them all sad marker faces.

Nonetheless, everyone at work loved them and even recognized them as ghosts, even the ones that were faceless… 🙂