Chocolate Ball Christmas Tree

This is a bit of an amalgamation of 2 different but similar recipes I found in christmas-y magazines leading up to the festive season. It was thus a little rough around the edges, and as always, not quite what I had pictured it to be, but overall they went down well. I feel I must warn you however, its not terribly quick - because its fiddly, and its kinda easy - once you get the hang of covering the balls in chocolate.

Ingredients: (here's where I went wrong first: these ingredients make 1 tree only... I had to add marshmallows to make it stretch and make 2 dodgy trees...)
2 x 600g Chocolate Mud Cake (essentially 2 ready-made mud cakes (I had one white and one chocolate) straight from Coles/Woolworths/Bilo/etc... no this is not cheating, but by all means if you feel the need, make your own mud cakes!)
3 cups white chocolate melts
3 cups milk or dark chocolate melts
1/2 cup hundreds and thousands*
1/2 cup flaked almonds*
1/2 shredded/dessicated coconut*
1 pack toothpicks
1 styrofoam cone (about 20cm high)

*or anything else you want to decorate the balls with

Method:
Step 1: Put the decorations into some kind of container to make it easy to sprinkle them onto the melted chocolate quickly. I used flaked almonds for one of my decorations, except that I crushed them up in a mortar and pestle so they weren't really 'flakes' anymore.

Step 2: Remove icing from mud cakes and crumble/break the cake up into crumbs.

Step 3: Make sure hands are wet/moist and then squish a handful of the cake crumbs into balls - I kept a small cup of water nearby to keep my hands wet for each ball. The balls should be about 2cm in diameter.

Step 4: Place either the white choclate or the chocolate melts into a heatproof bowl and suspend over a saucepan of boiling water (I use a vegie steamer attachment for the saucepans to sit the bowl in). Stir the chocolate melts until chocolate is completely melted (be careful - the bowl gets rather hot!). Once melted, remove from saucepan.

Step 5: Dip one cake-ball at a time into the melted chocolate. The recipe I was using said to use a fork to do this, but I discovered this can make the balls disintegrate into the chocolate... I found using my fingers was a messier but more reliable way of dipping the balls into the chocolate. Place the ball onto baking paper and sprinkle with one of the decorations you're using immediately as the chocolate will start to solidify quickly (especially the milk chocolate). Once all balls are done, leave to dry and if the christmas tree is not being assembled/eaten that day, keep in the refrigerater.

Step 6: To make the styrofoam cone stay securely on the plate I put a lump of glucose syrup in the middle of the plate and then pushed the cone down onto it. This was actually quite effective, though I did have to cover up the leaky bits of glucose syrup around the bottom with coconut.

Step 7: When ready to assemble, stick toothpicks into the styrofoam cone starting from the bottom (you may need to cut them in half for the top of the cone) and gently push the balls onto the toothpicks. Alternate colours, decorations etc in a pattern or randomly, whichever takes your fancy.

Because I had some 'slight' quantity issues, I had to bring in marshmallows to help fill the trees up properly, but if you use the right amount of ingredients (those listed should be right) you shouldn't have to worry about that!

I also had a gingerbread star left over from when I made gingerbread, so I popped one of those on the top as well for decoration :-)

The chocolate balls were very popular, and I might do this one again in the future but without the christmas tree. (not that you shouldn't try the christmas tree, just, don't be limited to christmas!)