Dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Schwarz, with admiration for his broad interests, inside and outside mathematics.Abstract We extend results of Jagy and Kaplansky and the present authors and show that for all k ≥ 3 there are infinitely many positive integers n, which cannot be written as x 2 + y 2 + z k = n for positive integers x, y, z, where for k ≡ 0 mod 4 a congruence condition is imposed on z. These examples are of interest as there is no congruence obstruction itself for the representation of these n. This way we provide a new family of counterexamples to the Hasse principle or strong approximation.