Car Bomb Cake Balls. Boom.

It's no secret that I am obsessed with Bakerella's cake balls. Obsessed, I tell you. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've made many different flavors over the past two years, and each one is better than the last (looking forward a few weeks, the carrot cake balls I mentioned at the bottom of the previous post would be great for Easter...just sayin'). I love them because they are delicious. I love them because they are easy. I love them because wherever I bring them, they are a hit.

So I decided to give them a St. Patrick's Day twist. Using this guy:

Last year on St. Patrick's Day, besides Irish Soda Bread, I rolled out Guinness Cake for the very first time, and it was fabulous. Dark, intense, chocolatey and yet Guinness-y, it had it all. And this year, I decided to use it as the foundation of brand-new cake balls. But not just Guinness cake balls. What I really craved were Car Bomb cake balls!

The Cookie Buffet: Pumpkin Bread Bites

I've never attempted a pumpkin cookie before, even though autumn is my favorite season, and nothing screams "Fall" more loudly than pumpkin-flavored goodies. Most of the time, I content myself with pumpkin pie, but I knew from the beginning that I'd definitely want to include pumpkin cookies in the cookie buffet at the shower.  I found a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe on the FoodNetwork online courtesy of George Duran. I tweaked the recipe a significant amount, changing the amount of sugar, spice, and pumpkin.

The Cookie Buffet: Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. Where would a cookie buffet be without them? Believe it or not, this was a new recipe. I normally make the good ol' standby Tollhouse recipe, which is yummy to be sure. But I didn't want to make the same old thing for the shower. I've been wanting to branch out and experiment with chocolate chip cookies that use both butter and shortening for a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity. A little gumshoe detective work turned up this recipe from the lady herself, Paula Deen. It uses both butter and shortening, and three kinds of chocolate.

That's right. And nuts. Well, at least it did by the time I was done tweaking the recipe.

The Cookie Buffet: Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

I decided to include a gluten-free selection in my shower’s cookie buffet, for one of my best friends and bridesmaids, Rachel, whose dietary needs necessitate gluten-free living. Now, I wasn’t sure how to go about making gluten-free cookies, but luckily my main man, Alton Brown, came to the rescue with this gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe. I can not say enough good things about Alton Brown in general, or this recipe in particular. Believe it or not, these cookies taste pretty much like any other chocolate chip cookie, no mean feat considering that there is not a smidgen of wheat anywhere in sight.

Alton’s secret, so I am told, is through his choice of alternate flours and their proportions. His recipe calls for a combination of brown rice four, tapioca flour, corn starch, and xanthan gum, which comes as close to recapitulating the taste and texture of wheat flour as you can get…without actually using wheat flour.

The Cookie Buffet: Spice Cake Balls

Cake balls. Have you heard about these things? Up until a year ago, I hadn't. And then I spied this post on (where else?) Bakerella's site. And folks, these things are easy. Ridiculously easy. And they taste good. Ridiculously good. So good that people have trouble believing that they are so easy, in fact. But I promise, they are. 

Aren't these pretty in their fall colors?

The Cookie Buffet: White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies

I totally dropped the ball on taking pictures of these while baking. Even though I make them all the time, this is the only picture I seem to have:

White chocolate macadamia nut cookies are one of those cookies that I make pretty often. It was the very first recipe I considered "mine" because I just threw it together one day, and it worked great.

The Cookie Buffet: Pierniczki

Because I had included Greek cookies in my cookie buffet, I figured it was only fair to include some Polish ones too -- the only problem was that I didn't know of any! A little research online, and I found what seemed to be the perfect cookie choice: pierniczki, a Polish ginger-honey cookie. These are traditional Christmas cookies. They are also traditionally rolled out and cut into shapes with a cookie cutter, but I decided to bypass that and convert the recipe into a drop cookie dough. In order to do that, I adapted the flour to fat ratio of one of Paula Deen's ginger cookie recipes, and tweaked it into a pierniczki dough that could be dropped by a cookie scoop.