Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2
It's a great day to keep making our candied cherries. You've got the fondant ready, right? If not, check it out here. It's fairly easy to make. Just don't substitute the packaged stuff for icings and frostings.
In fact, don't willy-nilly substitute much in tested recipes, especially in baking. A little here and there is fine. (Readers of this blog have repeatedly commented on successful substitutions to these recipes--and with good reason, too.) But too much and disaster lurks.
I once spent a whole evening teaching a rather hapless cook how to make a pie crust so she could take pies to work for a company function. We did it over and over again. I left her confident of her skill. I called her later that week to ask her how it went. "Terrible," she said. "Your recipe doesn't work."
Um, no. I'm a Southerner. Reconstructed, but still. . . . Listen, I KNOW pie crusts. My recipe is my grandmother's and my mother's. Don't even think about questioning it.
So I questioned her. Turns out, she'd run out of flour and then substituted corn starch.
"They're both white," she reasoned, still trying to pin it on me.
Sigh.
OK, off to making the cherries.
First, set the fondant out on the counter for an hour or so to let it come back to room temperature. Then scrape it into the top half of a double boiler set over a couple inches of simmering water and low heat. You can also use a heat-safe bowl set over a medium saucepan with a like amount of simmering water. The important thing is that the bottom of the bowl cannot touch the water.
Add 2 tablespoons of the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries, then stir or whisk over the heat until the fondant is 150F. Be accurate. And careful. Our candy thermometer doesn't go that low, so we use an instant-read meat thermometer for this task.
It's important to keep the fondant from going above 150F--so if necessary, remove the top half of the double boiler or the bowl from over the simmering water, stir off the heat, then put it back over the water, and keep stirring, back and forth, trying to regulate the temperature without letting it go over the prescribed mark.
Why the cherry juice? Because it will color the fondant nicely and give it a faint cherry taste.
At the end of the whole process, remove the top half or the double boiler or the bowl from the heat. The fondant should be fairly smooth, something like this:
Next, use paper towels to blot 60 maraschino cherries with their stems dry and dip them into the melted fondant, coating each up to its stem (but not above) and letting any excess pour off.
This is a lot of fun! And because the temperature is not too high, you can get older children involved. But two tips: 1) keep a whisk in the bowl so that you can stir the fondant if it forms a skin and 2) let that excess run off so that the cherries don't develop a candy "foot" as they cool. If the fondant should get too thick or even harden in the bowl, set it back over simmering water and let it come back to 150F.
Transfer the dipped cherries one by one as done onto baking sheets lined with silicone baking mats or wax paper.
Once all of them are done, set the dipped cherries aside while you melt the chocolate. Oh, and one more thing before we go on: if you want a more fondanty, candylike coating on the cherries, let the fondant harden on the dipped ones for 15 minutes or so, then do a second dipping in the warm mixture. You'll undoubtedly have extra, so there's no problem. (Why the extra? Because it helps with the dipping the first time, a nice deep bath for the cherries.)
Now for the chocolate. The best part. The raison d'être. The sine que non. The. . . .
Anyway, melt 12 ounces chopped semisweet chocolate in a second bowl over the same amount of simmering water over low heat--or in a cleaned top half of the double boiler. (Note Bruce's medieval-looking chocolate chopper. Oh, these chefs with their tools!)
Two tips about melting chocolate: 1) if any escaping steam from the simmering water below the bowl condenses onto or into the melting chocolate above, the mixture will "seize"--that is, break into little threads with a water residue (if so, you've got to start over--so keep the heat low and the simmer low as well); and 2) melting chocolate must never get above 130F or it will lose its sheen. Best to take the bowl or top half of the double boiler on and off the heat repeatedly, stirring all the while, until it's melted. And use a thermometer again to make sure.
Remove the bowl or the top half of the double boiler from the heat and stir in 10 additional ounces chopped semisweet chocolate. Why this second amount now? So that the mixture's temperature will begin to come down. Continue stirring until it's all melted--and then keep stirring until its temperature is between 90F and 88F. This is now perfectly tempered chocolate, the stuff that will keep its sheen. Keep the water simmering over low heat in that saucepan. During the next step, if you notice the chocolate's getting too thick or if its temperature slips much below 88F, set it back over the simmering water for a few seconds to warm it back up to 88F, stirring constantly.
Hold one fondant-covered cherry by the stem and dip it in the chocolate, completely covering the pink coating. Let any excess chocolate drain off and set the cherry back on those silicon-matted or wax-papered baking sheets. Keep going, dipping them all. Then let the cherries sit at room temperature for 2 hours before placing them in the fridge overnight. After that, store them in single layers in air-tight containers in the fridge for up to 2 weeks--but let them come back to room temperature before serving (if you can wait that long).
Mark Scarbrough | Posted on Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 9:54AM | in Candy, Chocolate, Fabulously Empty Calories candy, cherries, chocolate, chocolate covered cherries
Reader Comments (5)
i have no idea if this problem is on my end, but i can't see your pics, not since the fig cookies. i keep hoping it'll go away on its own, but it's not happening!
so are maraschino cherries real food? i must say, i'm not a fan, but this post is making me itch. i just gotta figure out what to coat in fondant and chocolate. it's too bad frozen sour cherries don't have stems.
Hmmm. Anyone else having this problem? I just checked Bruce's laptop and the pics came in.
Maraschino cherries? Real food? Sort of. In our categories, we actually have two in the middle: "almost real food" and "barely real food." I'd say they fall somewhere in there. You've got to have a candied fruit with lots of residual moisture--so most glaceed fruit won't work very well. Try canned mandarin orange sections--you'll need to blot them very dry and let them air-dry for a while. Then you'll have to spear them with toothpicks and hope they don't fall off--unless you have specific chocolate-dipping tools.
M.
No problems with the pics my end. They look delicious!
Something to make one day when I don't have little people grabbing my legs while I cook.
Fortunately I can see your beautiful photos perfectly! I bet these were incredible!!!
The seder is over and I'm checking email before crashing. Check out the great ham features in today's Washington Post--including a cute video of Bruce boning out a hunk of ham. And thanks, Kathleen, for your kind comments. They were crazy-good. Try them sometime!