Chocolate Coated Candied Orange Peels

These things are A-MAZ-ING.  They say everything is better home made, so what could be better than something that tastes like a home made Terry's Chocolate Orange?  I accidentally made about a trillion of these, so be careful if you're going to double the recipe.  You will end up with tupperware containers FULL of these guys.  On the other hand, they do take a while to make, so if you're into chocolate and orange, it might be worth making one big batch and saving them. 

First, cut your orange in half top to bottom.  Using your hands or a spoon, scoop out the orange pulp from the inside, leaving only the peel.  You can also juice the oranges then scrape out the remaining pulp, if you want to make orange juice out of it.

Cut orange peels into thin slices.  Try to keep then as consistently sized as possible.

This is where the fun really starts! Blanche the peels by putting them in a pot with cold water, covering them by about 1". Put a lid on the pot.  Bring the water to a boil, allow to boil for a minute or so, then drain water.  Repeat this process two more times.  Blanching is important as it removed the bitterness from the peels. 

Mix together 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water to make a simple syrup.  Add syrup to orange peels and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and allow most of the water to simmer away.  Don't wait for all of it to evaporate, as this will get your peels burnt and stuck to the bottom of the pot. Err on the side of taking it off too soon rather than too late.  Remove peels from syrup with a slotted spoon, placing them on baking sheets to dry.  Allow to dry for 4-5 hours, possibly overnight depending on the humidity where you are. Peels should be hard before dipping, but I dipped some that were still sort-of soft and it

was still delicious, just chewier.  

Melt chocolate in a double boiler.  Make sure the chocolate is really melty before you begin to dip the orange peels.  Chocolate isn't very warm will stick to the peels too much and result in an too much chocolate sticking to each peel. 

Dip each peel into chocolate.  You can dip the whole thing or just half.. I tried to do about 3/4 but it got more difficult as I started to run out of chocolate and resulted in a few finger burns, so be careful or use forks to manipulate the peels in the chocolate.

Chocolate Coated Candied Orange Peels

3 sunkist oranges
1 cup water
1 cup sugar for syrup
1-2 cup sugar for coating
Water for blanching
350g dark chocolate

Adapted from: Food.com