This is the request wrapper I used with the Stripe gateway interface in MemberPress. It does some basic error handling and automatically decodes the json returned from stripe. You'd just wrap this function in a try / catch block for error handling ... but if alls good it should return a data structure.

stripe_request.php

<?php
function send_stripe_request( $endpoint,
                              $args=array(),
                              $method='post',
                              $domain='https://api.stripe.com/v1/',
                              $blocking=true ) {
  $uri = "{$domain}{$endpoint}";

  $arg_array = array( 'method'    => strtoupper($method),
                      'body'      => $args,
                      'timeout'   => 15,
                      'blocking'  => $blocking,
                      'sslverify' => false, // We assume the cert on stripe is trusted
                      'headers'   => array(
                        'Authorization' => "Basic " . base64_encode("{$this->settings->secret_key}:")
                      )
                    );

  $resp = wp_remote_request( $uri, $arg_array );
  
  // If we're not blocking then the response is irrelevant
  // So we'll just return true.
  if( $blocking==false )
    return true;

  if( is_wp_error( $resp ) ) {
    throw new MeprHttpException( sprintf( __( 'You had an HTTP error connecting to %s' , 'memberpress'), $this->name ) );
  }
  else {
    if( null !== ( $json_res = json_decode( $resp['body'], true ) ) ) {

      if( isset($json_res['error']) )
        throw new MeprRemoteException( "{$json_res['error']['message']} ({$json_res['error']['type']})" );
      else
        return $json_res;
    }
    else // Un-decipherable message
      throw new MeprRemoteException( sprintf( __( 'There was an issue with the credit card processor. Try again later.', 'memberpress'), $this->name ) );
  }
  
  return false;
}