Milk Chocolate Malt Ball Cake

Wow, is this cake good! It’s a little bit of a twist on the standard yellow cake/chocolate icing combination with the addition of malted milk powder to the cake and a silky whipped ganache buttercream as frosting.

After my experience with the whiteout cake, I decided to ignore the step that had you whipping egg whites and folding them in at the end. Instead, I beat them into the creamed butter and sugar. The cake didn’t appear to suffer at all….it had a soft, moist, airy crumb that tasted subtly of malt…no one could identify the additional flavour in the cake, they just commented on how different and delicious it was. The recipe made 30 cupcakes.

The buttercream is a chocolate ganache with added butter. Confession: I did not use the high end, quality milk and bittersweet chocolates that are called for; instead, I used the Hershey’s semi-sweet chocolate chips that melted into a congealed mass in my pantry with the first heat wave of the season a few weeks ago. Perhaps the flavour wasn’t as milky as it should have been, but it was still very good.

I decorated the cupcakes with red maple leaf "quins” instead of Maltesers/Whoppers in honour of Canada Day.