Chocolate Strawberries : A surprisingly easy dessert

(Pictures  illustrated copied by Dylla)

Chocolate strawberries are the perfect dessert to end a romantic meal for two, or an elegant dinner party. But buying chocolate dipped strawberries can be pretty expensive. So making chocolate covered strawberries at home is the perfect solution!

The fact is, making chocolate strawberries is incredibly easy to do. You can get amazing results at a fraction of the cost. All you need is some strawberries, and a bit of good chocolate to melt.
So how do you do it? It's easy.

Step 1: Pick The Strawberries

Picking the right strawberries is important. Your chocolate dipped strawberries will only be as good as the strawberries you start with. Of course, smothering anything in chocolate tends to make it way better, but still, you'll get better results with better strawberries.

Here's what you should look for when you're picking the berries:

• Try to find ripe strawberries. Ripe strawberries are a nice, bright red. They're also firm, but should give a little when you press them. And they also smell great!
• Bigger isn't always better, but when you're making chocolate covered strawberries, bigger berries are a lot easier to work with. But ripeness comes before size!

Step 2: Pick The Chocolate

It's important to pick the right chocolate for your chocolate strawberries. But what exactly does that mean? Here are a few things to consider:

• Choose a chocolate you like. If you prefer dark chocolate, go for that. But if you like white or milk chocolate, that's the right choice for you. I find that semi-sweet is just perfect - it has a rich taste, and just the right sweetness. But that's just me!
• Choose a brand you enjoy. There's no need to go for the most expensive brand, unless that's what you prefer!
• Chocolate chips are perfect. They're small, uniformly sized, and perfect for melting.

Step 3: Melt The Chocolate

• Melting the chocolate properly is the key to making perfect chocolate dipped strawberries.
• If you know how to temper chocolate, you can do that. Tempering chocolate is a process that helps the chocolate dry firm and hard, so that your chocolate coated strawberries don't get sticky or melted.
• If you don't want to temper the chocolate, the best thing to do is to heat the chocolate until it's just barely melted, and then stir it until it's smooth. You can either melt it in the microwave in short bursts, over a double-boiler, or over very low heat.

Step 4: Dip The Strawberries

Once the chocolate is melted, the only thing left to do is dip the berries in the chocolate. And it's really just as easy as it sounds. Take your pot of chocolate, and dip the strawberry in it until almost all the red is covered - leaving a little bit of red uncovered makes the chocolate strawberries look even better!

Here are a few tips:

• Hold the strawberries by the stem. If they don't have one, you can use a toothpick or a fork.
• Start with the biggest berries first. The chocolate is deeper at first, and then gets shallower as you go. It's easier to get the bigger ones out of the way when there's still lots of chocolate.
• Let the strawberries dry on a cookie sheet covered in wax paper. That way, if you need to move them, it's easy.
• Strawberries coated in tempered chocolate can air-dry in just a few minutes. But if you didn't temper the chocolate, you may need to store them in the fridge for about 45 minutes for the chocolate to harden. After that, take them out though, or the chocolate will start to sweat and fall off the berries.

And that's really all there is to it. In much less than half an hour, you can be enjoying wonderful, elegant chocolate strawberries. So go ahead and try it - can you really go wrong with chocolate and strawberries?

Melanie Steele created www.enjoy-how-to-cook.com to make cooking accessible and fun, and inspire others to love to cook. For more great tips, check out her page on chocolate strawberries. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Melanie_Steele