Chocolate Covered Brandy Cherries. You know you want some.

If you saw my post yesterday with the recipe for Bourbon Balls, you may be thinking  that I only know how to make one basic kind of chocolate covered tipsy candy.  Not true.  So not true.  I'm just giving you the recipes that require a longer prep time first, because there are only so many days left between now and Christmas.  I'm nice like that.

I love chocolate covered cherries in all forms, shapes, and varieties.

They are good in my mouth.

I'll even eat the really bad ones that come from the Dollar Tree and are clearly of questionable origins, like maybe Alabama or somewhere. But these, these are the best.


[Printable Recipe]

WHAT YOU NEED:
1 jar of maraschino cherries (50-60ish) - with stems, without stems, I don't really care. They're easier to eat without stems but easier to dip in chocolate with stems. You're a grownup, you decide.
1 cup of your favorite brandy.  I used a cherry flavored brandy. If you don't have a favorite brandy, use rum. Or whiskey. Getting tipsy is the point here, not flavor...
3 tablespoons of softened butter
3 tablespoons of corn syrup
2 cups powdered sugar
16 oz. Bakers chocolate


WHAT YOU DO:

Open the cherries and dump out all the juice. Fill the jar with the brandy and put the lid back on.  Let the cherries soak in the brandy for a day or so.

After the cherries are nice and liquor-laden, drain them and dry them off completely. At this point, if I were really good, I would make up some sort of recipe to use the brandy.  I'm not that good, but you can drink that shit straight out of the jar if you want.  Yum.  Wanna know how I know?

Moving on...

Combine the butter and corn syrup until it's smooth. Add in the powdered sugar and knead it into dough. You will think that it won't happen, but it really will.  It will help if you use your hands instead of a spoon. The heat makes the dough come together.   Really, it's all scientific-y and stuff.

Take about a teaspoon of the dough and form it into a little disc.  Wrap it around the bottom of a cherry, and repeat 50-60 times.  If the dough gets sticky, pop it into the fridge for a few minutes.  After all the cherries are wrapped in dough, freeze them for an hour or so. While you're waiting, you can watch Oprah or something equally productive.

After an hour, melt the chocolate according to the directions on the package,  and dip each cherry in the chocolate. Allow them to dry.

Then wait.

And wait.

These are best after a week or two, but they are perfectly edible after a couple days.   They are not, however, all that great right away.

Trust me on this.

Enjoy.

Photo courtesy of Google Images, because guess who forgot to take a picture?  Again.  But mine looked just like that.  Mostly.