Melting chocolate with no tools, time, or skillz

Monkey

Is me.
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Why is it that chocolate covered strawberries sell for a dollar - and sometimes more - a piece? As in each? It's insanity!

Here is my super-easy recipe for making chocolate covered anything. You don't have to have a double boiler or a thermometer or anything special.

I'm putting the basic chocolate melting bit in blue...it can be skipped if you already melt chocolate. I'm putting a couple of serving suggestions at the end.

You will need:

One thing that can be heated on a stovetop and holds water. I'll call it a pot in this example, but a skillet or just about anything else could work.

One thing that completely covers the opening of the above "pot" and has sides. I usually use a skillet or a smaller pot. I'll call it a skillet so there's no confusion.

A well-buttered tray, plate, or other flat thingy that will fit into your fridge.

A spatula.


All you do is:

Put a package of chocolate chips (I prefer semi-sweet dark) on the stove top for easy access and to get it sorta melty already. It's OK if it doesn't get melty, though.

Make sure that anything you're going to cover with chocolate is clean, dry, and sitting next to the buttered tray.

Put about 3 inches of water into the pot. Heat it until just before boiling...lots of steam.

Butter the bottom of your skillet and put a tiny pat of butter inside. Place the skillet on top of the pot and wait until the butter melts.

Cover the bottom of the skillet with chocolate chips.

Now, here's the trick. If you melt chocolate too quickly, it'll never get crunchy again. Make sure that you could stick a finger into the melted chocolate completely without discomfort at any given time in this process. You will have to periodically remove the skillet from the top of the pot in order to keep the chocolate cool enough.

Continually stir your chocolate. New chips should take a little while to completely integrate, but the more melted chocolate you have, the faster new chips will melt. The whole process gets faster and faster as it goes on, making it very worth it to do very big batches. I usually melt about two good-sized bags of chocolate chips.



Chocolate covered strawberries rock. I also like chocolate covered orange slices and chocolate covered pretzels. Or try covering your favorite cookies. :)

My favorite thing to do with this chocolate, though, is what I did for my last birthday:

Buy or make a large, New York or California-style cheesecake, two pints of strawberries, and two packages of semi-sweet dark chocolate chips.

Slice one and a half pints of the strawberries and cover the cheesecake in them, top, sides, and all. Put another layer around the bottom.

Melt the chocolate.

Dip the remaining strawberries and set them aside to cool.

Pour a layer of chocolate over the cake. Make sure to get the sides; that's what the strawberries around the bottom are for - to catch all that chocolate.

Top the cake with the chocolate-covered strawberries and pour the remaining chocolate over the whole thing.

Cool, then serve with lots of milk. :D