Chocolate Cherry Mice

I was invited to a Disney movie party tonight featuring Cinderella and the invitation encouraged movie themed foods. Well pumpkin was already claimed so I had to think on it and I thought of this gem: chocolate cherry mice. My mom used to make them around Christmas time (not sure what they have to do with Christmas...), but who cares, let's make some mice!


The introductory ingredient shot. I've got maraschino cherries, chocolate coating, sliced almonds, red decorator's gel, plain Hershey's kisses and pull and peel Twizzlers. However the standard is to use cherries with stems but the city of Columbia refuses to stock such an item in it's grocery stores so I had to improvise with Twizzlers. If you have cherries with stems, no need for Twizzlers!
It's really important that you drain and dry the cherries really well. If they're wet, they'll cause the chocolate to seize and you'll get a clumpy mess. I just drained the liquid and dried each cherry in a paper towel and put them in a dry bowl.

If you have cherries with stems, you just have to dip each cherry in chocolate and you're set. However if you're stemless like I was, it's a bit more complicated. I first dropped a bit of chocolate on some wax paper and set a Twizzler bit in the chocolate to form a tail. I then put the cherry on top of the chocolate blob/tail combo and then blobbed more chocolate on top to cover the cherry. Not very neat, but it does the trick.

I give the chocolate combo a few seconds to dry a bit (but still wet) before I put a Hershey's kiss as the head and two sliced almonds as the ears. Pretty soon you'll amass quite a chocolate mouse army.
I stuck my mice in the fridge for a few minutes to harden, but as long as your chocolate seems set, this step is probably unnecessary. Regardless, I used the decorator's gel to make eyes and a nose. The red makes them look a little evil, but there's no other good color option. I think they're cute little guys anyways!