Love and Chocolate

Continuing from the last post about the romagical French Toast brunch, I concluded the evening by making chocolate covered strawberries for REB.

I love chocolate. I’m not a huge sweets person, but chocolate and fruit are an amazing combination (much like chocolate and peanut butter). I’ve used a lot of different chocolates when baking and making these chocolate covered strawberries. However, I’ve learned my lesson: you can’t skimp when it comes to chocolate. Use the best ingredients you can find! It makes a world of difference.

I used Ghiardelli milk and bittersweet chocolate to dip the strawberries.

These were freshly dipped in the bittersweet dark chocolate. The ones you see in the back there are the milk chocolate dipped ones. Both are delicious.

…But I didn’t stop there…oh no! Not me!

I went back and melted some white chocolate and drizzled them on some of the chocolate-dipped strawberries.

Did I mention I’m a chocolatier now? Because I can add that onto my already being a baker extraordinaire.

Now, I bought some Ghiaradelli white chocolate chips, but it clumped way too much and way too quickly. Blech! So I ended up buying a premium white chocolate bar, used some shortening and got the consistency I wanted in order to drizzle the berries.

We ended up adding shortening to the chips that had clumped up and they melted down pretty well. Well…well enough that we added some nuts to it and made white chocolate bark! Nom!

The end result! Aren’t they cute?? They turned out so well and I think the plate is just adorable! My friend B and I went into Urban Outfitters (a store I would normally never set foot in, except they were having an awesome sale) yesterday, and got some cute little plates for next to nothing!

I don’t make chocolate covered strawberries that often, if at all. But I thought today was a quasi-”important holiday” and I love my REB so much, so I pampered him with sweet treats all day long.

It worked.

Incidentally, the above picture was my 5/365  Project 365 picture for today. On Wednesday, at the close of week 1 for this project, I’ll post all 7 pictures I’ve taken this week and break it down.

Happy Valentines Day!