Monday 2 May 2011

Sunday 24th April - Homemade Easter Eggs...

As you may or may not know I love baking and making sweet things and so I thought I would experiment this easter and see if I could bring out the chocolatier in me and make famille bijoux homemade easter eggs instead of buying the usual Lindt chocolate bunnies (no offence Miss R!)  

Green & Blacks 72% cooking chocolate - lots! I like to use good quality dark chocolate when baking.
I decided to do a range of different fillings - organic dried fig and toasted pistachio (Daddy Bijoux), dried strawberry & roasted almond (Miss R & Mr R) and roasted hazelnut & cherry (Mummy 'Hazel' Bijoux)
I bought a plastic mould from my favourite shop in the world - a.k.a my happy place, 'Party Party', I was hoping to get the smaller ones but alas on Good Friday this was the last mould left so I was happy that at least I had this one - there is always next year, yes I have got the chocolate making bug!  This is the first layer of chocolate which I melted in a bain-marie and left to set in the fridge.
After melting some more dark chocolate I mixed in the filling and left to set again in the fridge.
It took a couple of attempts to work out the best way to get the eggs out of the moulds without getting fingerprints on but after a couple of batches I became a bit of a dab hand!  Latex gloves were a big help though - who wants a chocolate egg covered in finger prints I ask you?
The next stage was to 'stick' the two sides together, this is done by melting the flat side ever so slightly on either side and pushing together.  However after one quite unsightly attempt I decided to keep them as halves and wrap them up in baking parchment together as a pair, giving the illusion of a whole egg and making them much more ladylike to eat!
Et voila! I used different colour ribbon for different flavours and I think they were a great success, I can't wait until next year when I would like to be more organised and make lots of small eggs and experiment more!

Posted by: Miss J


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