Lately I have been trying to make cookies, cakes, frozen bananas involving or covered with chocolate. After this experience I would say I am not the biggest fan of chocolate. I am a fruit fan, veggie fan, naked food fan but chocolate is not in that list. However I like to combine chocolate with berries and I like using chocolate in cakes. When doing so I think it is important to use the best chocolate I can find. I used green black organics for this particular recipe but you can alternate it with some other favorite brand of yours. I have to make an exception for divine orange flavored milk chocolate i would say it is my favorite. I have strong feelings for the orange flavored milk chocolate, I must admit.
On the weekend my friend and I went to church street and whole foods happened to have the Spanish strawberries (250 grams for 99p). The strawberries were massive so we didn't want to buy it in the first place but the smell and the free tasters tricked us so we ended up buying some. I wasn't planning to try anything new with them but roaming around pinterest I saw this (shown left) gorgeous strawberries covered with white chocolate and dipped into blue crystal sugar, they looked absolutely amazing. Then I ended up in a grocery store picking up chocolates but couldn't find beautifully colored sugar crystals. By the way it just down on me that this strawberry features the colors of French flag. Oh well...
There are plenty of blog posts/videos available on the web showing how to cover strawberries with chocolate and many of other things such as coconut flakes, different sugar crystals but I think the chocolate itself looks very elegant and you can be creative with it. I have found a nice video on YouTube showing how to make strawberry tuxedos. This gentleman explains very well how to melt chocolate in a microwave, how to make a disposable paper cone from baking sheet and how to dress Mr. strawberries with tuxedos. All of them are recorded in three different YouTube videos i am giving the links since the embedding of the videos are disabled.
For paper cone:
For dressing the berries:
Recipe: (makes 5 tuxedos, 7 selection berries)
- 100 grams of white choclate
- 100 grams of 50% dark choclate
- 11 good sized strawberries (take 3-4 strawberries extra incase you can not get the hang of it in first place )
- Wash the strawberries and lay them on a paper towel and leave them on for 15-20 mins make sure the strawberries are dry before you start working on them.
- Chop the chocolates and put them in two different bowls.
- Melt chocolates in microwave at 50% power by stopping the microwave and stirring every 30 seconds. You do not want to burn the chocolate so it is very important to check every 15-30 seconds making sure it is melting without getting burned.
- For tuxedos dip one side of the strawberry to white chocolate then set it in a tray covered with baking sheet.
- Once you are done dipping to white chocolate refrigerate the tray for about 2-3 minutes.
- When the white chocolate is nice and firm take them out of the fridge and dip both sides to dark chocolate then with the help of a cocktail stick draw the buttons and the bow-tie.
- For the selection dip them into the chocolate, let them rest in the fridge and fill the paper cone with melted chocolate of your choice.
- Squeeze the paper cone from back like a toothpaste tube and draw lines with the chocolate as it pours from the tip of the cone.
- Try to eat them in the same day otherwise keep them in the fridge the strawberries get spoiled easily.
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