Oscar Ready Strawberries

A couple of friends hosted an Oscar party on Sunday and as soon as I got the Evite, I was doing my best to come up with something creative that would fit into the Oscar theme.  I pretty quickly settled on tuxedo strawberries.  Given the whole red carpet factor, I wanted to come up with a "female" counterpart to the tuxedos.  I went online and found a few pics for inspirations - most notably here, here, here and here.

I started out by getting all of the strawberries washed and dried.  I decided to pull the leaves off since they were ginormous.

All of the strawberries then got dipped into melted Baker's white chocolate.  I don't actually have an official double boiler, but I found a stainless steel bowl that fit perfectly into a sauce pan that makes for a great makeshift one!

I then sprinkled red sugar onto half of the strawberries, while the chocolate was still melty.

While the white chocolate set, I got the remaining white chocolate cleaned out of the bowl and loaded it up with some  Baker's semisweet chocolate.

I then dipped the sprinkle-less half of the of strawberries into the semi-sweet chocolate once on each of the right and left sides to create the tuxedos.

Using a toothpick, I added the bow ties and buttons.  I did the bow ties by drawing two lines in the shapes of a stretched "X" and then filled each end in.

I didn't have much luck with the necklace beads and the lacey pattern with the toothpick so I loaded some of the semi-sweet chocolate into a pastry bag and cut the tip off and piped the chocolate onto the strawberries.

Here are all of the finished strawberries:

And here is a closeup of a couple of them:

All in all I think that it was a successful first attempt at tuxedo strawberries!