In this, the fourth of my Easter recipe series I am writing for Aldi, I decided to step way out of my comfort zone.
I was inspired by a post by Charlotte Oates. I love her blog. You can view her original Easter egg recipe here.
I've been reading Charlotte's blog lately in an attempt to improve some of my baking and dessert cooking skills which are right now quite bad.
When I showed this recipe to my eleven year old daughter, Jennifer, she insisted we give it a go. I figured, if we can do it, so can anyone regardless of their experience cooking with chocolate. I haven't done anything like this for over twenty years.
The good news is, it worked without a hitch. In fact, after the first few were made, I was kicked out of the kitchen and my son, Joe, Jennifer and Jennifer's friend Lucy took over.
Just follow these instructions and you can make delicious homemade chocolate Easter Eggs that are fun to give away to friends and family or simply keep and eat them yourself.
I purchased my Easter egg moulds from Lakeland but you can also find them online at other shops.
As Charlotte mentioned in her post, it is important to temper the chocolate. This gives the eggs a shiny glow and stops the eggs from becoming crumbly.
Here are Charlotte's instructions on how to temper the chocolate
Place about two-thirds of your chocolate into a small pan over a very low heat (or bain marie if you prefer) and heat the chocolate until it reaches a temperature of 45ºC (milk and white chocolate) or 48ºC (dark chocolate) – Don’t worry if not all of the chocolate has melted, it will continue to melt after it’s removed from the heat.
Decant the melted chocolate into a bowl and add a piece of the unmelted chocolate you set aside before.
Stir the chocolate in until it has melted.
Keep adding pieces of the unmelted chocolate until the temperature of the chocolate has been reduced to 30ºC. At this point it’s ready to use.
If you have any lumps of unmelted chocolate left, I’d recommend removing these and setting them aside to reuse at a later date (or as a mid-egg making snack).
One last thing...
If you are making lots of eggs, purchase a lot of moulds. The process of making one egg can take quite some time especially if you are adding decorations like we did on some of the eggs.
When decorating, you will need to temper each different chocolate separately and allow them to set before adding the next chocolate.
To do our decorations, we simply drizzled the chocolate over the moulds with a fork. It worked!
We used white chocolate and dark chocolate for the decoration and Choceur milk chocolate from Aldi for the eggs.
Recipe
Homemade Chocolate Easter Eggs
Ingredients
- 150g good quality chocolate per egg - plus a little more just in case
- 9x14cm Egg mould or close enough
Instructions
- Place a baking tray in the oven at it's lowest setting.
- Once you have tempered your chocolate and allowed in to return to 30c, pour about 70g into each mould. To be honest, I didn't weigh the chocolate. I guessed. 🙂
- Allow the chocolate to completely coat the inside of each mould. You can see photos of this being done above. You may need to gently return the heat the chocolate back up to 30c from time to time if you are making a lot of eggs.
- Place the moulds in the fridge for about 30 minutes to set.
- When you remove them from the fridge, carefully cut away any excess chocolate and remove the eggs from the mould. This is quite easy. If your egg halves don't come out easily, return them to the fridge for a few more minutes.
- When the egg halves are out of the moulds, remove the baking tray from the oven and place the eggs, open side down on the warm tray. This will melt the chocolate a little so that you can stick the two halves together.
- Place your completed eggs in a cup or bowl to dry and repeat.
