A Lesson In Failure From Some Strawberries

Chocolate covered strawberries. They don’t sound too hard to make, right? And they’re almost zero waste! All you need are strawberries and chocolate.

I’ll admit: I’ve never been the best cook, but I never thought I’d be able to screw something up this badly. 

It all started with my friend and I, bored on a Friday afternoon. We decided to cook, saw chocolate in the cabinet and strawberries in the fridge, and were inspired. So we confidently popped some chocolate in the microwave (we were too lazy to use a double boiler). But - it wasn’t melting fast enough! So we added some milk to smoothen things up, and that’s where everything went wrong.

If you know anything about chocolate, you’ll know that adding liquid while a chocolate is melting will cause it to “seize,” or essentially clump up and become unusable. So all our hard work — washing and drying strawberries, rationing out different types of chocolate into a bowl — resulted in the one and only strawberry you see below.

Pathetic Glorious, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, my friend’s parents made the meal below in the same amount of time:

We got a good couple of laughs out of that, and learned a couple things along the way too:

1. Don’t add milk to chocolate unless you really know what you’re doing. Think things through before you act, and it never hurts to do a little bit of research too.
2. If adding milk to chocolate fails once, then don’t do it again for the second bowl of chocolate! There’s a reason why they say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It’s okay to make mistakes, but learning from them is important too!
3. Just keep melting your chocolate. Even when things are looking dark and lumpy, just keep melting your chocolate, little by little, and eventually you’ll reach your desired liquid goodness. Have a little bit of faith in the process before you pull the milk out. Take things one step at a time. Even if you’re not sure where you’re going, you’ll still be making progress.
4. Your chocolate is not as bad as it looks. Even though our chocolate ended up clumpy and mushy, it still tasted pretty dang good with the strawberries. Make the best of your failures; learn, laugh, and move on.
5. Keep making chocolate strawberries. Everyone starts somewhere - even people like my friend’s parents, who whip up beautiful meals in the same time it takes us to make one sad strawberry. And that all comes from practice.

We’ll definitely be trying our hand at chocolate strawberries again, and hopefully with some more success next time now that we know not to blindly add milk. Who knows what we’ll screw up once we get to the next step? Either way, we’ll have some fun with it.