Cake Balls: Yummy like cake, with twice the work!

I was planning on titling* this post "See, I'm not completely useless in the kitchen" but then my cake balls came out looking like this:

So... apparently I kind of am. Though to be fair, those are the balls I covered with Wilton's Shitty Shitmelt, which I'm pretty sure is made of equal parts candle wax and shattered dreams. They lured me in with their "Midnight Black" color, preying heartlessly on my debilitating** weakness for halloween and my sentimentality for my brief goth phase. "Black cake balls!" thought I, with childish glee. "With red velvet inside! It will be so halloweeny!"

Long story short- it never reaches a dippable consistency, it just gets all toothpasty. Like thick frosting. The package says you can thin it with vegetable shortening (yum?) but of course I didn't have any around since I assumed, foolishly, that candy melts would actually melt. Travis had the brilliant idea to cut it with some coconut oil, which did significantly help the consistency, though I'm a little wary of the added flavor. Coconut + red velvet + cream cheese? Hmm.

Anyway, I ran out of that crap pretty quickly and covered the rest in regular old dark chocolate:

Much better. Granted, they're still more "cake blob" than "cake ball," but listen, I am an artist. You can't just expect me to conform to everyone else's idea of "what a cake ball should look like" or "what kind of sprinkles actually show up on chocolate" or "how many of them I can eat without throwing up."

It really did look great at the cake stage. I should've just stopped there. Oh well.

This is pretty much the "recipe" I used, except I made homemade cream cheese frosting instead of canned stuff (and I have a lot of it left... need to think up a use for it.)

*I can't believe that's actually how you spell that. Tit-ling. Snorgt.

** I used to get extra time on exams in September and October because the teachers knew I was too busy fantasizing about costumes.***

*** That's a lie, and a tasteless one at that.