Chocolate dipped strawberries

You might have noticed yesterday’s photos included chocolate dipped strawberries. Yes, they were home made. Yes, they were delicious. No, the strawberries were not home-grown. The strawberry pot likely won’t explode until next year…

I started with a recipe. I mean, it seems pretty obvious, I know. Melt chocolate and dip strawberries. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Just a wee bit. The recipe I found called for 2 tablespoons of shortening to be melted with the chocolate. Yes, tricky, I know.
Anyway, I started by washing the strawberries, because my mommy always told me to wash fruit before consuming it. Then I put it back into the plastic, environment killing, thingy it came in.

I decided to try both a semi-sweet chocolate chip and a dark chocolate. Truthfully, you really couldn’t tell the difference when I was done… They were both yummy!

First I melted the semi-sweet chocolate chips with 2 tablespoons of shortening in a glass bowl over a simmering pot of water. In case you didn’t take Home EC, this is called a double boiler (shout out to Miss Chamberlain at Cheney Middle School! I can sew and cook thanks to you).

Next I stuck toothpicks in all of the strawberries. And then I put on an apron. I have a habit of getting quite messy when I cook, and DJ’s Valentine ’s Day gift to me was an apron. For those of you thinking he’s terribly unromantic; I asked for the apron. We were leaving for Hawaii the next day and flowers would have died before we got back. I gave him beach towels.

Anyway, once the toothpicks were in the strawberries, I started dipping them into the chocolate. I stirred the molten chocolate after a couple of berries were dipped to prevent it from getting chunky.

Somewhere on the internet I read someone who recommended picking up some of the Styrofoam blocks from a craft store to stick the strawberries into to dry. You know, the kind we used to make wreaths out of. You didn’t do that? Take some cloth, cut it into squares and make decorative wreaths? Oh, well… you know what I mean.

The Styrofoam worked perfectly. I could stick the toothpicks into it and let the berries dry upside down. Yes, I had a lot of chocolate on me when I was done. But oh so fun and yummy! I’m already thinking of incorporating these into Christmas packages.

(By Christmas I’ll be baking in our new kitchen. SQUEEEEEE!).

Once I got through the semi-sweet chocolate I washed the glass bowl and started again with the dark chocolate. I had more chocolate than strawberries, so I improvised and used marshmallows that sadly didn’t get used in s’mores this summer. But, I have to say that the chocolate-dipped marshmallows were a hit too! YUM.

The only thing I would do differently is to space out the strawberries on the Styrofoam a little more so that they don’t touch. This will prevent getting two yummy treats stuck to each other…