Chocolate Covered Dried Cherries – Easy, Fast and Delicious!

Cherries are fascinating fruits. I love them a lot because they have a delicious taste and a wide range of health benefits. Even if dried cherries do not keep all the biological energy of the fresh fruit, they are still extremely beneficial and tasty. That’s why I enjoy using them in various recipes – from salads to baked pies, cakes and bries, from meat stuffing to yummy desserts.

One of the easiest ways of enjoying dried cherries is to cover them in chocolate. What can I say? Even if chocolate is not the healthiest product on Earth, it is a little pleasure that we can allow ourselves from time to time.

This recipe is really simple. All you need is 1 or 2 cups of dried cherries and several ounces of tempered chocolate (generally, for 1 cup of cherries you will need about 8 ounces of chocolate). Before discussing the recipe itself, let’s see what tempered chocolate is and why does it need to be ‘tempered’ in the first place.

If you buy a bar of raw chocolate and melt it, it will become white and crumbly afterward – a result of the separation of fat molecules, which solidify on top of the chocolate. If you want to have a nice-looking, tasty hard chocolate after melting it, you have to learn how to temper it. There are many ways of doing it – you can find lots of useful tips online and choose the method that suits your taste and your available kitchen ‘tools’.

Now, let’s move to our chocolate covered dried cherries. First, put the cherries into a coating pan. While spinning the cherries at a low speed, add melted chocolate spoon by spoon, until the coating of the cherries has reached the needed thickness. After that, remove the cherries from the pan, allow the chocolate to solidify and voila! Your delicious dessert is ready!

If you don’t like to cook, you can go to the nearest supermarket and buy a pack of chocolate covered dried cherries. They’re extremely tasty as well, but this way you miss the fun of doing it all by yourself!

Another way of combining cherries and chocolate is baking a chocolate cake with dried cherries. For this, you will need the following ingredients: 1 cup of white flour; ¾ cup of Cocoa; 1 cup of pitted dried cherries; 1 cup of sugar; 1 cup of buttermilk; 1 tablespoon of baking soda; 2 tablespoons of liqueur (you can use a cherry-flavored one); sweet butter kept at room temperature (about 8 tablespoons); half a tablespoon of almond extract; 2 eggs.

Preheat your oven to 350˚F. Take a tube pan (it is especially suitable for baking cakes) and coat it from the inside with butter and flour. Mix the flour, the cocoa and the baking soda. Put the dried cherries in a separate dish and add the cherry liqueur. Stir together the butter and the sugar until you have a fluffy mixture. Add the eggs to this mixture and continue to stir. To this point, you should have 3 separate dishes. Take the recipient with the flour and the cocoa and add it to the butter-sugar-eggs composition. At the same time, add the buttermilk and mix until it incorporates. The almond extract should be added to the dish with the cherries. Add the cherries to the main recipient and then put everything in a batter. When ready, put the mixture into the pan and bake it for about 45 minutes. When you remove the pan from the oven, don’t take the cake out of the pan immediately – allow it to cool for about 20 minutes. After that, you can put the warm cake on another plate, wait until it gets cold and enjoy your chocolate cake with dried cherries!