Today is my mother’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom! Though we aren’t celebrating her birthday today because she’s been feeling a bit under the weather, I had to at least bring her some of her favorite homemade chocolate-covered cherries. I also decided to throw in an extra surprise– chocolate-covered raspberries!
Both are super-easy to make. I just use chocolate chips, always the store brand.It does make a difference! For the cherries, I use maraschino cherries. For the raspberries I use fresh raspberries.
Drain the cherries to get all the excess juice out. I just empty the jar into a colander. While the cherries are draining, line a baking sheet with wax paper and get your chocolate chips melting. I have a special melting pot just for chocolates. (If you don’t have one, I’ve found that melting the chocolate chips in a glass measuring cup and then setting the measuring cup in a pan of hot water works great for keeping the chocolate melted while you work.)
If you are making raspberries and cherries, I recommend starting with the raspberries first because the sugar in the juice from the cherries will gunk up the chocolate after a while.
Just drop a raspberry (or cherry) in the melted chocolate, gently swirl it to cover it with the chocolate. Scoop it out with a spoon and drop it onto the wax paper. And repeat! Add and melt more chocolate chips as needed. When you are done, put the chocolates in the refrigerator so that the chocolate will firm back up. Then they are ready to gift (or eat)! If I am gifting them, I line the gift box with wax paper or put the chocolates in mini baking cups.
My mother likes my homemade chocolate-covered cherries better than any other chocolate cherries that she has found. It has become a tradition that she gets them every Christmas, birthday, and Mother’s Day.
This was the first time I made the chocolate-covered raspberries, so everyone had to taste-test them and decide whether the cherries or raspberries were the favorite. The raspberries won over the cherries 3 to 2! But mom still prefers the cherries 🙂
And lastly, don’t forget the card! I save a ton of money each year by making my own greeting cards. It sounds cheesy, but I have a couple of greeting card programs for my computer that I paid less than $10 each for. I make all my greeting cards with this software. Add to to software one box of greeting card envelopes and one package of white card stock and I’ve been good stocked for several years. The nice thing about the greeting card software is that I can totally customize the cards– I can add names, change the wording to be suitable, create my own wording, add my own pictures, or anything else I might want to do. In this case, you can see that I decided the card should say that my mother should enjoy lots of her favorite chocolates:
Family have really come to appreciate these personalized cards because more thought has gone into them. On the rare occasion that I have “cheated” and purchased a card, they have actually been disappointed. I really prefer to make my own cards and love that I don’t have to stand in the card isle trying to find the perfect card and then flip over the card and gape at the ridiculous price printed on the back.
hooked-on-crafting.com 