4th of July Strawberries

Chocolate covered strawberries are the best, and there are so many ways to personalize them for different occasions. The other day, I saw 4th of July cherries and thought they were so cute, but I don't like cherries. So, I decided to do the same thing but with strawberries!

I know I am far from the first person to do this, but I wanted to do it, so I thought I would share my experience with you anyway making 4th of July Strawberries!

Ingredients:

• Strawberries (however many you want)
• White Chocolate/Candy Coating - for my 1lb of strawberries, I didn't quite use the 8oz I melted, just to give you a reference
• Blue Sprinkle Crystals
• Red Sprinkle Crystals
• 4th of July Sprinkles (optional) - the ones I used didn't look as good as the crystal sprinkles, but if you get the right ones, I'm sure they'll look great; smaller is better!

Utensils:

• Cookie Sheet and Wax Paper
• Microwavable container and spoon/knife (I like to stir with a knife because then a bunch of your candy coating won't get caught in the bowl of the spoon)
• Mini bowls for sprinkles
• White cupcake liners - optional for fancy individual serving

Start by getting everything ready.

Wash and dry your strawberries. Make sure there isn't any water on them or it could mess up the coating.

Put a sheet of wax paper on a cookie sheet (I used a cookie sheet so I could easily move them around if I needed too).

Get your bowl and sprinkles ready. After doing this, I found it easier to either sprinkles the sprinkles on from the bottle or use my fingers.

Melt your coating!

Once your coating is melted, it is time to dip your strawberries! Make sure all the excess drips off. Any extra will just cause you problems when you add the sprinkles so get it off now! Try to cover about 2/3 of the strawberry with the coating. You want to make sure some of the red is still showing, so don't cover the whole thing!

Time to add sprinkles. For the first couple, I tried to "dunk" my strawberry in a bowl of sprinkles and this caused the coating to bunch up on the strawberry. If you want to coat it that way, I suggest gently tapping the sides of the strawberry into the sprinkles until you've covered all you want. The plan is to cover about half the candy coating (which is then 1/3 of the whole strawberry).

You can also pinch the sprinkles in your fingers and sprinkles it on or sprinkle it on them right from the sprinkle bottles.

If you are going to do red and blue together, I suggest pre-mixing the sprinkles. This will get you a better-blended covering of sprinkles. At first, I did one color then the other and it was uneven.

You can see here a strawberry where the coating got messed up from dunking. Just be careful because the coating can be pretty finicky the more you handle it.

Time to enjoy!

One thing I thought of doing and completely forgot to try and photograph, is putting them on white cupcake liners! This is a great way to make them easy for people to grab and would look really nice when serving.