How to Make Chocolate Covered Cherries for Less

"Life is like a box of chocolates", Forest Gump by Winston Groom, 1986.

Yes it is! Why settle for nuts or creams when you can make your own chocolate covered cherries in minutes for way less than it costs at a candy store. Here's how:

Take one or two jars or pitless cherries with stems right off your supermarket shelf. Now buy several bars of milk or dark chocolate. Be careful because some dark chocolate is high in cocoa content and hard to melt. Nestle's semisweet is fine as is Hersey's.

Once home, take out a 2 quart pot and a Pyrex 2 cup measuring cup. It is acceptable to use a 1 quart pot and a 1 cup Pyrex measuring cup, but of course you will have fewer chocolate covered cherries, which may be unacceptable to most chocolate lovers.

Step 1) Put 2 to 3 inches of water in the pot.
Step 2) Break up the chocolate bars into tiny bits (oh what the heck, you can use chocolate chips to speed the process).
Step 3)Put the chocolate in the measuring cup.
Step 4) Put the Measuring cup into the water and bring to a slow boil. Be careful not to let the water bubble into the chocolate.
Step 5) Carefully dip each cherry into the melted chocolate up to the stem.
Step 6) Put the chocolate covered cherry on a non-stick surface to cool.

Or as my wife suggests, do it even more quickly my melting the chocolate in the same Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave for between 1 to 2 minutes. To me this is not as much fun.

After the cherries have cooled they can be dipped again to increase the thickness of the chocolate. The second layer can also be a different type of chocolate giving you a combination dark and milk chocolate coating. If you do the combination use the dark chocolate first since it has a higher melting point than the milk chocolate. Refrigerate for an hour or more and eat them right off the stem.

What a treat!