- Have you ever wanted to surprise somebody
with some delicious and romantic
chocolate covered strawberries?
They're so much easier than you think.
And today we'll be making them several different ways.
You're watching Preppy Kitchen, where I, John Kanell,
teach you how to make delicious homemade dishes
to share with your family and friends.
These chocolate-covered strawberries
aren't gonna cover themselves, so let's get started.
First, we're gonna choose the chocolate you want.
We're gonna use a bunch of different kinds,
but the dark is gonna be very dark.
70% cacao bittersweet.
And, I'm not using chips.
You could totally use semisweet chocolate chips,
or even milk chocolate chips, if you want.
It's up to you, because it's your dessert, I tells ya.
All right.
Chop it up.
And really, the only reason you're chopping the chocolate
is so it melts more quickly and uniformly.
If you have a giant piece mixed in with the small ones,
it's gonna take a while.
(upbeat music)
Okay.
(pot rattling)
(laughing) What's that?
My water's boiling.
This is the first time I'm using this pan.
Look how clean the copper is.
It's never been touched.
Chop chocolate into a bowl over simmering water.
Of course, the water will not touch the bowl.
It's a gentle steam heat to gradually warm it up.
You don't want to burn you chocolate. It's sad.
Let it warm up.
You can kind of like give it a few minutes.
Go do a dish or two, and then come back.
But by a few minutes, I mean 90 to 120 seconds.
Really quickly, the bottom is gonna start melting,
and you just want to move the chocolate around.
If you are not living that double boiler life,
you could totally use the microwave.
Just go onto 50% power, 30-second intervals.
30 seconds at 50%.
Turn, turn, turn.
Mix, mix, mix.
Again, and again, and again, until it's all melted,
or all mostly melted.
So I might have been making
a ton of chocolate-dipped strawberries ahead of time,
just to practice,
and also for my Instagram video, @preppykitchen.
So I have some chocolate melted already,
and it's still melted.
For the purpose of this recipe,
I'm using about a cup of melted chocolate.
Pour your chocolate into a glass.
A bowl, no.
A glass, yes.
Why?
It's easier to dip that way.
If you're pouring it into a bowl,
you'll have to roll the strawberry around.
It's never gonna like like perfectly straight and dipped.
Repeat the melting with some white chocolate,
and some candy melt.
As you can see, candy melt is much whiter,
and the benefit is you can melt it
in your microwave really easily.
You can't really burn it.
And, it hardens up in a snap.
So you can use all white chocolate.
you can use all candy melt.
Whatever you like.
Your strawberries.
All right, let's set a little station up now.
Gonna one-hand it.
Pour some chocolate into a piping bag.
You don't have to use a piping bag for the drizzle,
but it's kind of easier for me.
You could just drizzle with a spoon.
Give it a twist, and snip the tip off.
For this, you could also use a number one
or two round piping tip.
Transfer some of your white chocolate
to a piping bag as well.
This isn't like a baking recipe.
This is more of like a fun, just kind of wing-it recipe.
So, I want to show you a couple of different ways
to decorate the strawberries.
Now that we have all of our ingredients ready,
in this video you'll be seeing a lot of footage I shot
just before this for Instagram.
Real close-ups, so you can get the best angle.
It's not really easy to have something small
to camera for you.
This is the fun part, so let's start dipping.
Into the white chocolate.
Just kidding, it's candy melt.
So you can dip them all the way, or leave a little bit
of the red showing.
Into the chocolate now.
And you can see the chocolate is much, much looser.
Look at that. So pretty.
The cooler the chocolate is,
the longer it'll take for the dripping to stop.
Here you go.
Huh.
This looks amazing.
If you saw my champagne cocktail video,
Doesn't have to be like--
(champagne bottle hissing)
(laughing) Oh, no.
Click up here for that.
This is the perfect accompaniment.
Hello.
Champagne, strawberries dipped in chocolate.
That is the definition of everyone's gonna be happy,
unless you're allergic to strawberries
and chocolate and champagne.
You're gonna repeat this dipping process.
It's like dip as many as you want.
Keep going.
And for some of these designs, you need the shell hardened.
For some of them you can just keep going.
So we're gonna make a couple of tuxedos.
Because a tuxedo strawberry is a total classic.
So cute, and it's actually shockingly easy.
But we're also gonna do some that just have the drizzle.
If I wanna do a nice drizzle,
I'm actually gonna lift the strawberry up.
It's okay if it's still wet.
And then just drizzle across like that.
Look at that.
Nice.
Same for the chocolate one here.
I'm actually fine lifting them up when they're still wet
because you're removing a bunch of the excess.
So they're gonna look neater in the end.
Look at that.
We have some stripes.
We have some white plain ones for the tuxedo,
and a chocolate one,
which we'll decorate a different way as well.
However, take a look at this for the chocolate.
We're gonna do this stripes.
But, you're right, that's boring.
I want something new.
Okay. Let's do something new.
So now we can take a skewer,
and drag it across like that.
Look at that.
So fun.
Yeah. I have the same design on my spiderweb sheet cake.
Look at that. I love that. Okay. All right, so here we have
a freshly-dipped strawberry in white,
and what we can do is add a little sprinkle
of sanding sugar.
If you don't know what sanding sugar is,
it's basically just colored sugar.
If you're using candy melt, you can dye it with
a little bit of gel food coloring,
so I'm gonna use just a quarter drop
of a soft pink, my favorite.
All right, so take just a little bit,
and then mix it in to your candy melt.
You can see a little goes a long way.
And we're gonna dip a couple of more strawberries.
And on top of that, we can do a really fun drizzle.
You can do some dark chocolate.
Back to this one.
That's looks nice.
A little wavy, but now you can pull it down and across.
(upbeat music)
All right, I saved the best,
or at least my favorite, for last.
The tuxedos.
So, these guys are little gentlemen strawberries.
Maybe for the gentleman in your life?
White on the bottom.
You could've also done a white chocolate, though.
And now for the dip.
The only thing you have to do is dip like that,
and then dip like that.
You wanna have a V of white leftover.
So a couple of times I over dipped
when I first started learning how to do these.
Let the excess drain off.
So much easier this way.
This guy's perfect.
He's gonna be facing me.
Use a skewer or anything sharp,
and just make some little chocolate buttons.
If you have space for three buttons, that's great.
If you don't, don't worry about it.
All right, and now for the bow.
So here you can draw it on or you could pipe it on.
I'm gonna draw it on.
And I'll show you some Instagram footage
because in the Instagram video, I actually used a piping tip
with a number one.
Ama.
Thank you.
Very nice.
If you like this recipe,
check out my Valentine's Day playlist.
All your favorite Valentine's Day recipes.
So much to love.
But now, it's time for a bite.
(strawberry crunching)
I mean, that's really good.
Chocolate and strawberry.
Winning combination.
Mmm.
I need a glass of champagne.
If you like this video, hit that like button and subscribe,
and I'll see you in the next video.