On Sat, 7 Dec 2013 18:23:17 -0800, "Cheri" >
wrote:

>
>"John Kuthe" > wrote in message
.. .
>> On Sat, 7 Dec 2013 15:18:31 -0600, "Polly Esther"
>> > wrote:
>>
>>>I'm thinking about making some candy. Didn't we have a resident
>>>candy-making
>>>expert here? What HAVE we done with him? I see some recipes call for
>>>paraffin and some don't. Any one have a foolproof recipe for chocolate
>>>covered cherries? I'll provide the fool. Polly
>
>> And I have a recipe for Chocolate Covered Cherries, but 1) it's not
>> fool proof and 2) you can't have it! It's a ton of work and expense
>> and makes the best Chocolate Covered Cherries on Earth (I'd dare to
>> say!) I use real pitted Bing cherries, not those marachino
>> monstrosities.
>>
>> John Kuthe...
>
>Gee, that was helpful. LOL
>
>Cheri

I don't have my recipe in electronic form yet, and am not gonna
transcribe it right now. Oh wait, yes I do:

Chocolate Covered Cherries

1.5 lbs fresh cherries
1/2 bottle Cherry Kijafa (a Danish fortified cherry wine, pronounced
Kee-a'-fa, I believe)

Pit cherries, soak in Kijafa in refrigerator overnight. Then drain,
and makeup candy center dough:

3 tbs 70 degree F butter
3/4 cup marshmallow creme
1 tbs invert sugar (candy supply store)
15 drops inversase (candy supply store)
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
2.5 cups powdered sugar (or more, for consistency)

And prepare dipping chocolate! (Real dark chocolate is, IMHO, the ONLY
chocolate to use!) It usually takes me about 2-3 lbs of chocolate to
dip 1.5 lbs of cherries. Chop chocolate finely, then melt chocolate
ever so slowly, and never too hot (30 sec bursts of 'defrost' in the
microwave, stirring in between, works nicely), to avoid breaking the
chocolate's "temper", else it may never set up as a solid, without a
LOT of refrigeration or retempering! (But that's all chocolatology,
yano?)

Wrap each drained cherry in enough of the candy dough to completely
cover the cherry, then dip in melted chocolate! Place on wax paper,
let cool. Use latex or nitrile exam gloves to handle, this works very
well.

Let the freshly dipped cherries set for 1 or 2 days. Over this time,
the inversase and invert sugar reaction causes the candy dough centers
to liquefy! (That's how they get that liquid in there, it's really
cool!!)

Eat! Be careful, they are drippy, and VERY delicious!!!!

Another hint: because the centers liquefy, it's important that the
chocolate coating be leak free, else the liquefied center candy will
leak out! This was particularly difficult for me to overcome, until my
engineering background told me that instead of picking up each freshly
dipped and cooled cherry to repair the leak at the bottom of almost
every cherry (the center is heavy, and pushes right through the melted
chocolate to the wax paper, yano?), if I placed each freshly dipped
cherry ON some solid chocolate, instead of wax paper, the bottom leaks
would be self-repairing! So last year, I made little thin smears of
dipping chocolate on the wax paper for each cherry to be dipped, let
them cool, then dipped each cherry and placed each one on the little
chocolate "platform" I had created! This worked outstandingly!!


John Kuthe...