Easter crafts have never seized the imagination in our household. We struggled with the school's annual Easter bonnet parade; we made amateurish Easter baskets for egg hunts. But the thought of making our own chocolate Easter eggs - all gleaming and fragile and flawless - never occurred to us.
It is, however, eminently possible. All you need are some plastic moulds (they're not expensive - we got ours from Jane Asher's sugarcraft shop, where a large half egg is £1.55), a cooking thermometer, greaseproof paper and copious amounts of chocolate. Three boys - two aged 10 and one aged five - with some supervision, managed to produce an amazingly professional array of eggs and baskets, chicks and sweets in milk, plain and white chocolate, and a lovely swirly mixture of all three.
Hygiene, I'm afraid, was a very low priority. Grubby fingers, not long pulled out of nostrils, were plunged into the molten chocolate. Wooden spoons went from chocolate to mouth to another mouth, to floor, then back to bowl, to mouth and so on (apologies to those who have eaten the results).
When working with chocolate you need to follow three basic rules: always use the best-quality moulding chocolate - chocolate-flavoured cake covering will not do; never overheat the chocolate and never allow water or steam to get into it.
We managed to keep to the first rule - we used the very best cooking chocolate money can buy, Belgian couverture (70% cocoa solids and £4.05 a bag). The last two rules were more tricky and we did waste a fair bit, but even disaster turned to delight. Every time the chocolate solidified into goo, a near-hysterical cry would go up: "It's another catastrophe - let's eat it!" and a gaggle of chocolate-smeared boys would descend on the basin with the ferocity of a pack of hunting dogs.
Here's how you do it. Heat some water in a pan (hot but not boiling); half-fill a basin with chocolate; stand it in the water and stir with a wooden spoon until it has melted. Plain chocolate should be heated to about 44°C - white and milk should go no higher than 42°C. If you don't have a thermometer, crook your little finger and touch the chocolate with the flat side - it should feel just warm.
Holding the egg mould in the palm of your hand, ladle in chocolate until it is about a third full. Tilt the mould in all directions until the chocolate covers the entire mould, then tip the excess chocolate back into the bowl. Place the mould upside down on a piece of greaseproof paper, leave to dry for about 10 minutes, then repeat the process. (We had to do it three times before the chocolate was thick enough.)
Put the mould into the fridge till it completely solidifies. We left ours for a couple of hours, though sugarcraft books suggest it should be far quicker than that - about 20 minutes. Extract the eggs by gently pulling the sides of the mould outwards (very tricky) and to glue the two halves together, dip the edge of one into molten chocolate then hold it against the other half to complete the egg.
I leave you with three pieces of advice. Always make sure there is one big Easter egg mould for every child - we had just the one large mould, and all three boys wanted it. The chicken mould held some appeal, but clearly its chocolate surface area was not as great as that of the big egg, and the persistent egg envy was a source of stress and tension.
Make sure your kitchen is reasonably squalid before you start. Chocolate was literally flying through the air at some points and we are still finding dollops of couverture in murky corners of the fridge and floor.
And finally, perhaps most importantly, relax about the truly terrifying amounts of chocolate your kids will consume. We conducted an informal experiment during the course of the afternoon - can one five-year-old consume more than his entire bodyweight in chocolate and still not vomit? Answer: yes.
· For moulds and chocolate:
www.jane-asher.co.uk.
