dessert difficulty rating...

Chocolate-covered strawberries really should be easier to eat. At the fondue or dipping point, of course, it's quite elementary. Or, if you've got access to the strawberry before application of chocolate, and some basic tools, a knife, a skewer, fancy fork, whatev. But if they're already made, and chilled, so the chocolate is a tasty shell surrounding the sweet and crunchy-juicy berry, you've got a bit of maneuvering to deal with... assuming you're not into eating the whatever-it's-called-does-it-have-a-name? sphincter-top of the berry, y'know?

And I'm not.

At least, I'm not interested in it. I've never tried it. So far as I know.

So, you've got this chocolate-covered goodness, but you've gotta hold it from where those little leaves are at that pinched top, and some of those leaves, understandably, are trapped in the chocolate, so you've gotta pluck them from their sweet dark amber (and they do come loose pretty readily, you've just gotta work at getting hold of or scratching off an edge of the leaf), then sorta gather them all together in your fingers as a handle of sorts, and then you try to get your mouth around the strawberry.

Thing is, when the chocolate's allowed to settle and harden around the strawberry, it's sitting flat on some surface, so what you've got when you pick up the strawberry, post-chillin, is a flat base, a chocological recording of the molten state pooling and cooling below and around the strawberry, sometimes bigger than the strawberry itself. Kind of a bonus, cuz who doesn't love slabs o chocolate, right? But it's all connected, see? Attached to the strawberry, one of these monitor stands of chocolate makes for a pretty serious mouthful on its own—like taking that extra giant potato chip you've been saving til the end all at once—forget about the strawberry shaped projection into the z-axis.

Daunting.

If you try to break up the chocolate instead of going for it, you end up cracking the shell and having all of the chocolate fall off in pottery shards. Kinda neat seeing the pattern of the nubby strawberry surface on the inside, true, but it's a compromise of the experience, see? And you'll get chocolate all over your fingers, which does melt in your hands as well as hour mouth. I wouldn't mind that part SO much, except that I'm consuming these at the office, y'know, where I work with a *keyboard* and *mouse.* So I need a good scrubdown before getting back to work after a chocostrawberry dessert or break.

There are certainly worse things...

Or so I hear.

I'd dig seeing these strawberries with their caps sliced off before their dipped, or maybe after their dipped and before their chilled? Then there'd be no leaf picking and gripping, just the all-over chocolate coating, y'know? I'm fine getting my fingers choc'd up in that situation. There's no alternative or half-way.

Just sayin.

In spite of the difficulty rating, they're still *really* frickin tasty. They'd just be even tastier if they were less trouble. =)

Michael Scott: That's what *she* said.

Jack Donaghy: That's what your mom said to me last night—Booyah!

Heh heh. Typing out "choc'd" reminded me of Target's chocolate candy brand, Choxie. "There's chocolate, and then there's Choxie..." My sister pointed it out to me once and explained how non-tasty they are and how the correct pronounciation should be "chokesy!" How awesome is that? =)

(Not that "chalksy" is much better. =)

My car is still in an ice box. Albeit not as menacing of one as (wack!) a week ago, but still surrounded, and *in* frozen ice and snow. And—wooHoo!—rain and snow are supposedly on the way tonight.

Gonna be a lot of pizza boxes in my recycling.

Keep on keepin on~