Ho Yummy

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I decided to try making chocolate covered strawberries, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time! I’ve always loved eating these at our catered work functions, as they seem to make the strawberries extra tasty.

The task appears simple enough - heat up chocolate, dip, cool, and serve. Before venturing forth, I checked for recipes online to see what other tips and tricks others have. Some appeared fairly complicated, but I decided to stick with simple, easy and quick.

I went down to my local Superstore and purchased a pound of Strawberries for $5, along with bulk Callebault chocolate baking chunks, about 250 grams of each. I didn’t end up melting all of it - my suggestion is to start with a small amount, and keep adding chunks as you need them. I’m no kitchen connoisseur, as you’ll soon see - my makeshift double-boiler consisted of a saucepot with an inch of water in it, and a ceramic mixing bowl.

I washed and patted dry the strawberries while starting to melt the chocolate on low heat. Make sure to keep the bottom of the bowl out of the hot water as this will make the chocolate too hot. I started with white chocolate first as that’s my favourite, and used a trick I learned from one of the recipes I came across - using toothpicks to hold the strawberries as you rotate them around.

I’m alright with things being a little messy, so I just rolled them as best as I could, and tried pulling them out so that that last point of contact is the little tip on the bottom of the berry. I noticed as I moved along my batch that the chocolate mixture starts to become dry if you take too long, making it harder to have a nice smooth coat of chocolate. Some cooks recommend adding shortening to the mixture, but I don’t find this too appealing. All I did was added some more chocolate chunks, and that seemed to help with the consistency problem. I think the key is to act fast, however.

Next up was milk chocolate - some prefer dark as this might be too sweet but I figured I would give it a try. I made a few milk chocolate ones and tried to copy the tuxedo strawberries by dipping my white chocolate ones at an angle. Make sure you have refrigerated these first, as you don’t want the two mixtures blending in to one another. Another trick I tried was drizzling the opposite coloured chocolate onto the berries. Some suggested using a fork to do this but I found it very difficult. Some of my drizzles became plops and I had to improvise and blend things together! I have to say I didn’t get very far with the tuxedo idea, but perhaps with practice and a steadier hand, I’m sure one could get these to look great. I popped everything into the fridge to cool and poured the remaining chocolate into a small dish with some dried cranberries to form a candy bar of sorts.

I just tried one of the white chocolate strawberries with milk chocolate drizzle and it was ho yummy! Looking back, I spent about $11 on the strawberries and chocolate, and the whole process was quite fun and relaxing. This recipe, if you can call it that, yielded 17 strawberries. You can easily take breaks while melting the chocolate as everything is pretty steady on low heat. I would love to do this with my little niece who would enjoy licking the mixing bowl afterwards!

Let us know if you have any other tips and tricks, or comments on store-bought ones that you have tasted!