Strange baking: Vanilla and coconut cake truffles (AM)

When I was little, my grandmother used to always make a little something she called snowballs but were in fact akin to something you might know as 'truffles'.

I realise that's not a very helpful distinction, because a truffle can be something like this:

this:

or like this:

What we're talking about here is the last kind of truffle. A treat made from crushed marie biscuits, butter, cocoa, condensed milk and coconut. She used to make those delicious bastards all the time, such that my school lunchbox pretty much always had little bits of coconut in the bottom. This is something I look back on very very fondly, and makes me wish I still got to eat them and that my handbag had little bits of coconut in the bottom, instead of tampons, information leaflets from tampon packets, and general bag detritus stuck to chewing gum stuck to loose change.

But I digress. The reason I tell you all of this is so you will understand why I sat up and took notice when I found this recipe the other day for Vanilla and coconut cake truffles.

I got excited thinking these truffles must be like a blonde version of the snowballs my grandma used to make, just as the blondie is the blonde version of the brownie and the white chocolate mud cake is the blonde version of the chocolate mud cake (Pickle made one once, it was delicious). But then I read the recipe and realised...what this is, is not a truffle. It is some kind of cake bite. This is basically crumbled up buttercake, mixed with vanilla buttercream icing, rolled in coconut.   

What the eff , people. What the eff??!!. Obviously I decided I had to make it immediately.  

It starts with making a whole cake. 

Then crumbling the whole thing up, and making vanilla buttermilk icing.

Then combining the two and making them in to little balls and, as you may have guessed, rolling them in coconut. 

All through this process I couldn't help thinking how idiotic it was. Making an intensely buttery cake only to destroy and then try to rebuild it with icing that really could have just gone on top with a sprinkling of coconut? Why would you do that? No really, why? I needed these blonde snowballs to be super delicious so the questions would stop.

Look, they were fine. But they are very very sweet. And they look so much like lemon slice that I found it disappointing that they didn't taste like lemon slice.

And they really needed to have some crushed marie biscuits involved somehow. They would have been so much better. I think I'm just going to make lemon slice next time. Or snowballs.