Turn Boxed Cake Into Creamy Truffles With One Ingredient

Truffles are one of those magical treats that are more than the sum of their parts, starting with simple, convenient ingredients to become a delicious, elegant addition to the dessert table at any celebration or gathering. No one needs to know that those fudgy, delicious bites are little more than boxed cake mix and ordinary softened cream cheese under the sweet chocolate coating, anymore than they need to know your elegant, old-school flummery is just Jell-O and evaporated milk.

If you've ever made cake pops from leftover cake and frosting, making truffles is the same basic principle –just leave out the handy stick and swap the frosting for slightly denser softened cream cheese. Once thoroughly mixed together, the cake and cream cheese form a dense, malleable dough that's pretty easy to roll into balls and decorate as you please. The most important part of the whole process is making sure everything is the right temperature at the right times. You need cooled cake, room temperature cream cheese, ice-cold truffles, and warm coating chocolate.

Warm cake would melt the cream cheese and ruin your truffles, while cold cream cheese is too dense to mix smoothly into the crumbled cake crumbs. Once mixed and molded, putting your truffles in the freezer helps them keep their shape when coated in melted chocolate. It also helps the chocolate set faster, ensuring they're cool enough to withstand being drizzled with colored icing or shimmery luster dust. Be sure to keep them refrigerated until you're ready to enjoy them.

The best thing about these truffles isn't how easy they are to make (though that's a bonus), it's actually the wide range of flavor combinations you can create. Starting with the cake mix, there are literally dozens of different delicious flavors, including everything from classic white, yellow, and chocolate, to strawberry, lemon, and spice cake. Think how easy it would be to make simple three-ingredient pumpkin spice truffles with a warm, autumnal spice cake mix and equal parts pumpkin spice and honey pecan cream cheese. You could even coat them in orange candy melts to make them look like little pumpkins.

If you prefer fruit-flavored desserts, there are options in abundance, from lemon cake mix and blueberry cream cheese to strawberry mix mingled with pineapple infused cream cheese to take things in a tropical direction. Any fruity cake mix would also be delicious mixed with honey butter, honey pecan, or brown sugar and cinnamon cream cheese. Any of these options would be gorgeous coated in colored sugar or pastel candy melts.

Of course, we can't neglect the chocolate options. Brown sugar and cinnamon cream cheese mixed into devil's food cake crumbs might just be the most indulgent combination ever, though red velvet cake (it contains cocoa powder) blended with strawberry cream cheese comes close. You could also mix ordinary cream cheese with German chocolate cake mix, and roll each truffle in flaked coconut for a new take on a classic.