How to make an ethical Easter egg

by Tamsin McCahill on 18.03.08

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 manoeuvre 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

TOP IMAGE by Flickr user tracyhunter