In Which I Lose Versus Chocolate-Covered Cherries

I found a recipe for chocolate-covered cherries at Chocolate Covered Katie, a website which I like but have artistic differences with since I deeply believe that the secret ingredient is butter.  The secret ingredient is always butter.  Fortunately, shortening to butter is a straightforward 1:1 conversion and she gives an alternative to coconut oil and cocoa powder that involves actual chocolate.  

Nonetheless, I ran into problems.  First, getting the pits out of my cherries.  

I've heard devices exist to remove cherry pits.  I have a knife
and my fingers.  

Life is just a bowl of slightly mangled cherries.  

Problem number two came when I realized I have no double boiler, and now I'm wishing I had used a recipe calling for lots of cream that I could melt and then pour over the chocolate.  I'm nervous about melting chocolate directly over a stove.  It's really hard not to burn it.  

I added sugar because unlike the
recipe, my chocolate is unsweetened.

After all that angst about melting chocolate, I succeeded only to have my chocolate sauce be way to sticky to be sauce.  Possibly the adding of the butter was a mistake.  I tried adding milk, got too much in, and turned to my dear friend cornstarch to fix it.  

Despite my completely unfounded belief that cornstarch will fix my problems, the resulting sauce was too thin to really stick to the cherries.  Or I didn't give it long enough to cool first, or something.

Dipping cherries one at a time is just way too much work.  

The result was not so much chocolate covered cherries as cherries with a slight chocolate tinge.

Well, I still have a glass of wine, slightly chocolatey cherries, and the world cup.  It's not that bad a loss.