The Cooking Critic

I’m going to give you a hot tip. When making Chocolate Fondue, use cream, when making Chocolate-Covered Strawberries, use shortening to create that smooth-but-set exterior. There you have it. I know many of you have spent sleepless nights wondering about this, so now you can rest easy knowing you can create the perfect creamy or hardened chocolate companion for your strawberries. Let’s hear that collective sigh of relief.

Von’s had strawberries on sale (buy one pack, get one free), and since I absolutely cannot resist strawberries, I purchased them. It’s a lot of strawberries for one girl, but I started off at a decent pace—having a bit of a sweet tooth that evening, I made a fondue out of Nestlé’s chocolate chips, and enjoyed my snack immensely while watching The Constant Gardner.

Fast-forward to a couple of days later—there’s still quite a few strawberries in my fridge and Shayna Maskell’s Oscar Party on the horizon. Why not make something where others can enjoy these strawberries before they become inedible in a few days? At first, I considered making Berry-Capped Cupcakes, something I made once before with some buy-one-get-one-free strawberries. My memory recalled that these cupcakes were good, but not spectacular. Still, an excellent food to put strawberries into if you don’t want them to go bad. But why are there so few good strawberry recipes in the world that I constantly have to turn to Berry-Capped Cupcakes anyways? I’d love to meet other nice strawberry recipes, but they just aren’t showing their face. But more than my feeling of frustration for being trapped in this relationship with Berry-Capped Cupcakes was the feeling that I really really didn’t want to go to the grocery store to get the cupcake tins and buttermilk. Yet, I needed to show up with something at the Oscar party, and I didn’t want to bring alcohol since I had no plans to partake of the alcohol (taking a break from liquor and beer—as it turns out, they don’t seem to help my half-marathon training. Wine, on the other hand, helps immensely.) The only answer to the must-bring-something -but-don’t-want-it-to-take-a-lot-of-time-and-am-worried-the-strawberries-may-go-bad-soon dilemma was to make chocolate-covered strawberries. So they were made.

Making chocolate-covered strawberries is kind of fun because it’s easy and makes you feel fancy. I used my makeshift double boiler (see pic), which creates softer heat and a smoother mixture than a pot directly on the fire—I think that’s what it does anyways. Threw some leftover Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Bittersweet Chocolate in the pot (not bad, but if you don’t mind spending a little more money on your chocolate, buy some Valrhona—it’s worth every penny) along with some shortening and some Kahlúa, and I was in business. Then I created my little army of Chocolate-Covered Strawberries.

Assessment: Both strawberry recipes were totally toothsome. (Sorry—word of the day—had to use it.)