Chocolate-dipped strawberries await Valentine’s Day procrastinators at Morkes in Palatine

Valentine’s Day procrastinators have a perfect excuse to wait until the last minute to pick something out for their sweetest at Morkes Chocolates in Palatine.

Fresh chocolate-dipped strawberries — the most popular item at the shop — have a short shelf life, so it's best to purchase them no sooner than a day or two before Valentine’s Day, owner Rhonda Dehn said.

“We do a lot of chocolate-dipped strawberries and those are something that you need to pick up a day or two before you're going to be giving it,” Dehn said. “We’ll make them all day long, and we’ll go through 30 flats of strawberries — hundreds and hundreds of strawberries.”

Heart-shaped gift boxes of chocolates that come in a variety of sizes and weights are also popular, she said.

Dehn, husband Mark and staff members have been busy making dozens of varieties of chocolate in the store’s kitchen, and they’re already getting a head start on other holidays, making chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil for St. Patrick's Day and chocolate bunnies for Easter.

And with Fat Tuesday on the eve of Valentine’s Day this year, they had been making paczkis as well.

Dehn, a member of the Morkes family, said Morkes has been making chocolate since 1920.

Two other locations — one in Huntley and the other in Cedar Lake, Indiana — are independently owned and operated.