Oh Cupid!

Extra sweetness for your sweet Valentine 🙂

These are candy coated apples, btw. Yep, using chocolate melts 😀 Prepared these for instructables.com contest and I am sharing two way of candied apples, regular and cupid shape 😀

Regular Chocolate Coated Candy Apples

To make these chocolate covered apples are pretty simple. All you would need are:

Apples of your choice

Chocolate for coating the apple, of your choice. Can be almond bark, chocolate bars, chocolate chips, baking chocolate, and/or chocolate coating.

Lolly sticks, popsicle sticks, dowels, or even a thicker skewers, whichever is available

Sprinkles, chocolate and cookies for decorating.

Apple 1 – Heart Sprinkles

Melt your pink chocolate coating in microwave at 30 seconds interval, stir each time so you won’t burn your chocolate. If you don’t have pink chocolate coating, you can add red gel food into white chocolate coating once chocolate is melted, stir.

Insert a lolly stick into the top center for an apple

Dip/coat your apple and decorate with heart sprinkles

Place on parchment paper lined plate until chocolate harden

Apple 2 – Red Heart

Grate milk chocolate and set aside

Take out 2-3 tbsp of melted pink chocolate and stir in 1/2 – 1 tsp red gel food. This will create dark chocolate. Chocolate mixture will become somewhat grainy and crumbly. Right away knead and mold into a heart shaped mold and leave it in mold to harden

With the same method as Apple 1, dip an apple in the melted pink chocolate

Sprinkle apple with grated chocolate and press the hardened red heart

Place apple on the plate

Apple 3 – Chocolate Bomb

(I called that as I “glued” whatever chocolate bars and cookie(s) I got)

With the same method as previous apples, dipping an apple in melted pink chocolate

Place on the plate until harden

Into a small ball, place a couple of squares milk chocolate and melt it in microwave

Pour melted chocolate into ziplock bag or pipping bag, snap the corner and pipe/drizzle chocolate on harden apple

Decorate with chocolate bars (I used Aero dark chocolate, Reese and an Oreo) by gluing it with a dab of the melted chocolate in the ziplock bag

Place apple back on plate until ‘decorations’ are glued/dried on apple

Cupid Apples

Dip apple in melted pink chocolate as previous apples and let it harden

Now let’s decorate!

I did not have yellow chocolate coating so what i did was:

Into 1/4 c heavy cream 35%, I added some yellow gel food coloring (about 1/4 tsp at least)

Heat in microwave for 45 minutes then stir in 3/4 c white chocolate coating, stir until melted

Place melted chocolate in the fridge for at least half hour then beat with electric beater until it became whipped ganache (texture would look like buttercream)

Spoon whipped ganache into piping bag with rose tip or swirl tip and pipe as hair on the apple

Using edible paper and edible pen, draw wings on the paper and cut with scissor

Attach the wings on the piped hair (whipped ganache) just by pushing it on the hair

Using either modeling chocolate or fondant (blue, black and white), make eyes and draw smile and eye liner with edible pen

With either modelling chocolate or fondant (pink), create two balls and on left and right side of the apple as “hands” and place Cupid’s arrow on these hands

Cupid arrow is made by sticking red heart chocolate (made as previous heart chocolate on Apple 2) and end of chocolate arrow in lolly stick and you are ready with your cupid 🙂

Enjoy~