Sweet and Saucy Shop's Chocolate Dipped Tuxedo & Wedding Dress Strawberries

posted 5 months ago in Favors

Who doesn’t like chocolate dipped strawberries?! Well, the answerthat pops up in my head is “No one!” So you can see why I was soexcited to get a wedding order from one of my brides to dochocolate-dipped tuxedo and wedding dress strawberries. Now of course,after dipping 110 of them my excitement dwindled a little - but oncethey were all bagged up and ready to go, the excitement came back.

Now, these wedding favors are definitely a show stopper and very funfor your guests since they get instant gratification once they sinktheir teeth into these beauties. These favors are pricey, butrelatively easy to do. Hopefully this post will open your eyes to theworld of chocolate-dipped strawberries and help you realize that you can do it too!

First, you need to purchase long stemstrawberries. Now of course you can do this with regular strawberries,but if you are doing it for a wedding or event I would suggest goingfor the highest quality of strawberries, which will give you a largerstrawberry and will result in a more uniform look overall and give thatdramatic “wow” factor. Once you have your strawberries, you need towash and dry them thoroughly. Then you need to either temperyour white and dark chocolate, which is quite tricky to learn, but doesgive you a sense of accomplishment once you’ve done it. Or you can buycoating chocolate/confectioner’s chocolate which is already formulatedto harden or set once you have dipped your strawberries. A great brandof coating chocolate is Merkens, which can be found at Sugar Craft. Also, here is a link to more detailed instructions on using coating chocolate.

To make the tuxedos you need to melt ortemper your chocolate, and then dip the front side of the strawberryinto the white chocolate, making sure that you coat all the way up tothe top. Then place the strawberry onto a baking sheet lined with p archment paper and let it dry.

Once the strawberry has dried, you need todip the backside of the strawberry into the dark chocolate. After that,dip one side of the strawberry at an angle into the dark chocolate, and then dip the other side of the strawberry at the sameangle into the chocolate again so that you have matching sides of atuxedo suit.

Make sure and let the excess amount ofchocolate fall off of the strawberry into the bowl, so that you don’tget a big pool around the bottom of the strawberry once it dries. Onceyou’re done, place the strawberry back onto the parchment paper so itcan dry.

If your lines aren’t coming out straight,that’s because the chocolate you are dipping into isn’t flat all theway across. You need to make sure that the chocolate is a smooth surface to dip into.

To finish off your tuxedos you need tomake a cornet (aka parchment paper cones) to pipe the chocolate buttonsand bow tie on. To learn how to make cornets, you can go to this link.Fill your cornet with a small amount of chocolate and fold the sides ofthe cornet down to secure. (Hint: don’t overfill your bag because mostlikely the chocolate will harden anyway and you will either need tofill a new bag or try and microwave the old bag for 5 seconds so itre-melts the chocolate.) Only cut off a small part of the cornet tip,so that your chocolate doesn’t flow out too easily and then pipe threesmall dots up the strawberry and pipe two sideways triangles to form abow tie.

To make the wedding dresses you need todip your strawberry completely in white chocolate, and then let it dryon the parchment paper. Once dry, fill another cornet with whitechocolate and cut off a small amount of the tip.

To make the dress effect you need to pipe lines of white chocolate at an angle on one side of the strawberry and then the other.

Let dry and then pipe five small dots at the top of the strawberry to form a necklace.

Well, hopefully this tutorial helps youout a little with your next chocolate-dipped strawberry endeavor! Hereare a couple more photos of the finished product…enjoy!