More Than Living

How to make an ethical Easter egg

You don’t have to be Al Gore to be shocked at the amount of pack­aging around a shop-​​bought Easter egg. But even if your only con­ces­sion to saving the envir­on­ment is recyc­ling your empty wine bottles after a heavy week­end, why not do your bit this Easter by making your own eco-​​friendly chocol­ate Easter eggs?

Making your own is easy. All you need are the fol­low­ing items and an abil­ity to follow some simple instruc­tions. We decided to do just that, fol­low­ing this recipe on the BBC web­site. Unfor­tu­nately, we didn’t quite follow it to the letter, and our egg didn’t turn out exactly like the luxury ver­sion held aloft by beam­ing cater­ing col­lege stu­dent Gary Johnstone.

On the plus side, we can tell you exactly where we went wrong so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

You will need:

Easter egg moulds (avail­able from cook­ware shops for a few pounds each, or you could use a plastic mould left over from a shop-​​bought egg)
Cotton wool
Baking tray
Greaseproof paper
500g to 600g Fairtrade chocol­ate (milk, dark, or white).
Cotton wool
Large sauce­pan
Heat­proof bowl
Cook­ing ther­mo­meter (optional)
Ladle
Dessert spoon
Pallet knife

The method

1. Wash the moulds with warm soapy water, dry and then polish with the cotton wool. The moulds must be bone dry with no fin­ger­prints left inside.

2. Place the clean moulds on a piece of greaseproof paper on a baking tray. The jury’s out on the dif­fer­ence between that and the baking parch­ment we found, but it seemed to do just as well.

3. Break the chocol­ate into pieces and put in the oven proof bowl. This is where we made our first mis­take by not buying enough chocol­ate. In our defence, 500g to 600g did seem like a lot for one little mould, and have you seen the price of Fairtrade? It’ll become clear why you need so much when it comes to filling up the mould, so don’t skimp.

4. Now fill half the sauce­pan with water and bring to the boil. Remove the sauce­pan from the heat and rest on a firm sur­face. We used water straight from a boiled kettle instead, but that was fine. Then we put the bowl with the chocol­ate in it on top of the sauce­pan, so that the bottom of the bowl was just above the water, but not touch­ing it.

5. Next, keep stir­ring until the chocol­ate has melted using a cook­ing ther­mo­meter so the chocol­ate doesn’t go above 45C. We decided to risk it without one: we did look, but they were £12 from the cook­ware shop and we were still reel­ing from the price of the chocol­ate. It didn’t seem to matter much at this stage. The chocol­ate melted nicely but never seemed to get bub­bling hot.

6. When melted, take the chocol­ate off the heat and cool it slightly over a bowl of cold water while you keep stir­ring. This is where having a ther­mo­meter would really have helped. The tem­per­at­ure of the chocol­ate should drop to about 25C, caus­ing it to thicken up. Ours didn’t thicken much, which could explain some of the prob­lems we had later…

7. Now boil the water in the sauce­pan again and place the bowl of thickened chocol­ate over it to warm it up, again stir­ring all the time. This time it should warm to around 30C. We had no clue what tem­per­at­ure our chocol­ate was at by this point, which wasn’t ideal, but it looked nicely runny and smelled even better.

8. Using the ladle, pour the chocol­ate into one half of the mould, com­pletely filling it, then tap the out­side with the handle of a spoon to get rid of any air bubbles. Then pour the chocol­ate out of the mould and back into the sauce­pan. Now pour the remain­ing chocol­ate into the second half of the mould. Unfor­tu­nately, the reason for need­ing such a large amount of chocol­ate became clear when we got to the second mould – we didn’t have enough to com­pletely fill it up, leav­ing us trying to manœuvre the chocol­ate around the top so that it would be a sim­ilar thick­ness the whole way round.

9. With the knife, scrape off any excess chocol­ate from the top of the mould. You’ll have loads of chocol­ate left over, so you could repeat with two smal­ler moulds. Turn the rest into bis­cuits by mixing them up with crushed digest­ives – waste not want not, we reckon.

10. Put the chocolate-​​filled moulds onto the greaseproof paper and put them in the fridge to set. This is where dis­aster really set in. Our chocol­ate was too runny, so it just poured straight out of the mould and onto the paper. We had to fill the moulds again, then leave them upturned to set. Even in the fridge, it took them ages to solid­ify properly.

11. When your eggs are ready, the chocol­ate will shrink slightly and nat­ur­ally fall away from the mould. The first mould was fine, but on the second one the chocol­ate was too thin at the top and broke off, leav­ing an egg that looked like it had hatched.

12. Finally, warm a baking tray in the oven, take it out then rest your two halves of egg on the tray to slightly melt the edges so they glue together – you could even put sweets inside the egg before you do this. Frankly, with our broken, sad-​​looking spe­ci­mens, we didn’t even attempt this one.

The ver­dict:

Prac­tise makes per­fect and we reckon if we did it again armed with the requis­ite amount of chocol­ate and a cook­ing ther­mo­meter they would come out much better. On the price side, although the ini­tial outlay is quite large (once you’ve bought the moulds and the cook­ing ther­mo­meter) you’re all set for years to come. You wouldn’t want to give our failed attempts to your mum (even if she’s nor­mally charmed with any old rub­bish), but the mis­takes still tasted very nice.

Posted by Tamsin on 17 March 08

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by Flickr user tracyhunter

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​03-​​18 00:44:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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