Easy Chocolate Covered Strawberries Revisited

Valentine's Day is right around the corner, so we've been seeing a familiar pin pop up all over Pinterest again:

(source)

The caption usually found attached to this picture on Pinterest is something along the lines of "Genius! Put cut strawberries in an ice cube tray, pour melted chocolate over the top!" 

As we showed you last year though, following those instructions doesn't give you quite the same results. 

We did however give you some tips as to how we thought you could recreate the original picture at home fairly easily. The only catch was, we'd never tried our tips. We thought they would work, but we didn't know 100% for sure. So this year I decided to revisit the old Pinstrosity by testing out the tips we gave you. Lucky for us, it worked!

Mine didn't turn out as beautiful as the original, but as he is a professional and I'm definitely an amateur, I'd say this isn't too bad!

Here's what you'll need to make this at home:

• 1 Chocolate Bar. 
• I opted for Lindt because I wanted a candy bar with large squares rather than the small rectangles of a Hershey's bar. I'm not a huge fan of dark chocolate so I asked Cameron to pick up a milk chocolate bar for me. Apparently it's just a thing with milk chocolate to form it in the small rectangles. If I do this again I'll get dark chocolate (ooh! or maybe the raspberry or strawberry filled chocolate) so that it's in the large squares that will be easy to break off. Oh well. 
• Melting Chocolate
• I'm partial to Almond Bark, but some are partial to Wilton's candy melts. 
• Fresh Strawberries. 
• I tried to pick ones that were all close in size and which had the prettiest shapes. 

To start, cut the tops off of your strawberries.

I laid out parchment paper on the counter to make clean up easier. You can use regular paper, wax paper, or even tin foil if you want. Unwrap your bar and place it bottom's up on the paper.

Melt your chocolate according to the package directions. I used 2 squares of the almond bark and it was more than plenty. Drop in your strawberries one at a time and roll them around gently with a fork until coated evenly.

Tip the strawberry point up and scoop it up by sliding the fork underneath. By using a fork the excess chocolate can run off easier.

If I do this again, I think at this point I'd place the chocolates on the parchment paper to let the chocolate set and then dip them at least one more time to get more of a smooth finish. Whether you dip it once or multiple times, once you are done dipping a strawberry, place it on the chocolate bar to set up. Repeat until you've filled your chocolate bar and/or used all your strawberries.

See how you can still see the strawberry texture in the photo above? That's why I would go back and redip them a 2nd time if I were doing this again. My creation didn't turn out as beautiful, but my strawberries were pretty pointed and definitely not uniform. More dippings could help minimize the pointed tops.

All in all though, this really wasn't too bad. It came together in about 6 minutes. The strawberries adhere to the chocolate bar really well, but not so much that they are tough to pull off and eat. I was hoping to be able to break off  one square at a time, each with its own strawberry on it, but that didn't quite work out this time around. It's still fun though!