HAXCESS

This is just a note-to-self regarding something I tried today: handmade chocolate covered cherries. I basically kick ass in every way possible, even making myself a dessert.

I’m reasonably proficient at arithmetic. One of the ways I like to work a problem is to work backwards from a known answer/result towards the inputs and method. My desired result was awesome snack/dessert, and I had a bunch of ingredients: dark bittersweet bakers chocolate, sugar, cocoa powder, Grand Marnier (Cordon Rouge), maraschino cherries, and sour cream. I know, sour cream isn’t desert, but just read… So with the known inputs and final result, I decided to experiment and came up with this formula:

chocolate + cherries = effing awesome
So I put two ounces of chocolate into a glass and into the microwave. Also, I put a regular glass of water into the microwave to slow down the nuking. My microwave is a 1200W model (Consumer range is 600W-1500W). So it tends to cook stupidly fast, hence the glass of water.

What we’re doing here is putting molten chocolate into a mold, pressing a cherry into it, and topping it with more chocolate, then adding a cherry stem. Of course, if you’re patient, let it cool.

Okay so here’s what I did:

1. Nuke my chocolate: power 7; 5 minutes.
2. Wrap tinfoil around whole-shell pecans to make smooth molds. Not the entire pecan, just half of it so it’s open-ended. If you have round molds, congratulations on skipping this step.
3. Add a splash of Grand-Marnier to the chocolate. Maybe half an ounce? Pros like me don’t have a use for measurements
   It’s either the alcohol or the temperature shock that turns the chocolate into a disgusting chunky glob. Keep stirring until it’s smooth, nuke some more just for fun. I accidentally let the whole mix come to a boil. Despite thinking I just burnt two ounces of fine chocolate, I carried on.
4. Add a couple baby spoons of sour cream. I suppose one could add a splash of regular heavy cream instead, but sour cream works. I wanted soft gooey/chewy chocolate because of the next ingredient..
5. Get coarse grained sugar. I have the organic stuff that Starbucks uses. It’s amber colored with grains wide like the edge of a penny. This is for texture contrast to the gooeyness. I just kindof dumped a pile into my glass of chocolate, probably a tea-spoon worth.
6. Some cocoa powder to offset the new sweetness that the sugar will add. I don’t like to molest the bouquet of cocoa with too much sweetness. I just tapped a little pile into the glass, maybe a baby-spoon full.
7. Stir until the mixture seems appetizing. Because my chocolate boiled, it was a greasy lumpy mess, but stirring it forever made the temperature cool evenly until it was a bit thick. Some kind of oil came out of emulsion, maybe from the sour cream or the chocolate. This was actually advantageous – nonstick chocolate goo.
8. I harvested 5 cherries from a jar of maraschino juice and lightly sqeezed them in paper towel to make them less drippy. I also removed the stems.
9. Spoon a bit of chocolate into the mold, push in a cherry, top with more chocolate. TADA you’re done. I had all those cherry stems left, so I put the stems into the top of the chocolate topper.
10. Refrigerate.

And then I played some games and surfed the web for a while until I remembered that I wanted to make an awesome dessert. So I got my foil molds out of the fridge and unwrapped them. Of course the foil imprint on the chocolate looks somewhat unprofessional, but I don’t need further convincing of my pure awesomeness.

Result: Perfect. I could have rotated the chocolate over a candle flame to gloss the chocolate. Or just dipped it in more liquid chocolate. But I wanted to taste them. So I ate all 5. Well I didn’t want them to go bad… If I knew these were going to be that great, I would have taken pictures. But I lack all that kind of forethought. Oh well, I’ll just have to make them again!