How To Make Organic & Natural Homemade Chocolate Covered Cherries

In the last post we looked at Ingredients for Organic & Natural Homemade Chocolate Covered Cherries. Now let’s make some!

The night before: Place a cookie cooling rack on top of a regular cookie sheet. Place your cherries single file onto the cooling rack and let them sit in the fridge overnight. This helps to drain excess juice, which helps during the rolling and dipping process.

Rolling your cherries: The following day, grab a large mixing bowl and combine your butter, inverted sugar, condensed milk, extract, and powdered sugar. Mix and then knead this combo. It should be thick, and it may feel a little crumbly. Next grab a cherry, and surround it with the mixture.

The point is to make little cherry balls. Actually, these will be sort of big cherry balls – about walnut size, although, if you use smaller cherries make the balls smaller too. Put all your covered cherries single file onto a baking sheet covered in parchment, and place it in the freezer.

Make your chocolate: While your cherry balls are chilling, make your chocolate. Now, if you’re using chocolate chips, simply melt them with your shortening in a double boiler. If you’re making chocolate with bakers chocolate it’s a lot more work. Frankly, I suggest going with the chocolate chips.

However if you are using baking chocolate, you’ll need to temper and sweeten it. Place 6-8 oz chocolate in a double boiler and add a drop or two of vanilla extract. Add a bit of honey (I never measure, sorry). And then read the following article about tempering chocolate. Melt your chocolate slowly. Then, for dipping, keep it semi warm and mixable on the stove top.

NOTE: Some die-hard cooks I know, flip about me adding honey to the chocolate. It’s always worked for me though, so oh well. But if you like (I’m no candy expert) you can jaunt around the web and find a no-honey way to do this.

Dipping: Grab your chilled cherries, dip them in your chocolate mix and place them on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. As noted before, I suck at the dipping part. My only tip is to work fast. The faster I went, the better my cherries looked.

Chill them. Munch away or give away to happy friends and family.

Extras:

You can also dip your cherries in nuts or cover them with pretty natural sparkles. Kids like the sparkles. You can add different extracts like mint or orange. If you’re a crafty cook, I bet you could even figure out a chocolate mold situation so that your cherries look lovely. I won’t advise on pretty food though, other than to say, best of luck. You can also pop your cherries on top of cakes, cupcakes, or cookies.

To give as a gift:

I found some cute reusable boxes and tins, lined them with parchment paper, and stuffed them full of cherries. I added another sheet of parchment over the top before securing the lid. You can use little paper cups I suppose (see above image), but why waste paper? Another option is to save the candy containers people give you, the ones that already have compartments, and use them. Most are sturdy enough to wash gently.

For different chocolate covered cherry recipes check out cdkitchens. I looked around, and some of the recipes do not call for corn syrup.

[chocolate covered cherry image via teain.mycup via Flickr]