Berry, Berry Good

A few days I pinned something that needed to be made immediately.  As in, right away.

This is the item in question:

Now do you understand the sense of urgency?  

I thought so.

It was originally pinned from the website of a fancy-pants French chocolatier.  And the pinner implied that it could be made easily.  Insert strawberries in ice cube tray, cover with melted chocolate, freeze. 

That's it.  The instructions were so easy I couldn't afford not to try it.  Plus I had company coming, the perfect excuse to make something so decadent. 

In typical `A Casarella fashion I decided to document the process so the good viewers at home could play along.

Probably the hardest thing about this little project was finding an ice cube tray.  My fridge makes ice and I didn't own a tray.  I picked one up at Bed, Bath & Beyond and I love it because it has a cover (to prevent icky freezer burn).  If you need one (but don't want to change out of your pajamas to get it) I've attached an Amazon link in the footer of the blog.

Because my ice cube tray has narrow slots, I had to slice the berries (instead of inserting them whole as seen above) so I got out my knife and cutting board.

I bought some beautiful organic strawberries but to be honest, they weren't the most flavorful.   

Luckily that wasn't too noticeable once I covered them with roughly a pound of dark chocolate from Trader Joe's.

I'm not kidding either; I used almost this entire bar.  When I bought it I was sure there might be a bit left over.  

(You know... in case mama needed a little something to get her mind right.)

But we'll get back to the chocolate in a sec.

 So I went ahead and cut up the strawberries and put a few pieces in each slot.

 Then I broke up a bunch of the chocolate and melted it in the microwave.  As mentioned above, I ended up using most of the chocolate so I repeated the melting step a few times before I finished.

(Gratuitous molten chocolate shot.)

Then I covered each slot with chocolate.  If I were to do this again, I would probably put a little chocolate under each berry--a chocolate cushion if you will--I think if I'd done that mine probably would have looked a bit more like the original.

 When I was done covering the berries, I gently dropped the container on the counter a few times to even out the chocolate.  

Then I slid on the cover...

And popped them in my (desperate-for-a-cleaning) freezer.

They emerged a few hours later nicely hardened.  

I thought I'd be able to twist and pop them out like ice cubes.

But they wouldn't budge.

Here you can see where I tried (without luck) to chisel one out.

Finally I decided to put the whole tray in a shallow dish of hot water.  (Thankfully, they popped right out afterwards.)

 

And here's the finished product.

 

They're not nearly as perfect as the inspiration picture.  (They came out individually as opposed to one big bar, for starters.)

 

But they sure were tasty!

I'm going to link up over at this party; stop by and checkout all the easy-peasy projects!