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Photo: alasam

As Easter approaches, the temptation to spend large amounts of money on even larger amounts of Easter chocolate eggs is always a strong one. The good news for lovers of chocolate and lovers of crafts alike is that making your own chocolate Easter eggs is simpler and more fun than you might think. The best part? You get to eat your mistakes. Doing so is easier than you might expect and requires only a few simple things – a metal bowl, mould, and, of course, the chocolate, as well as any other extra ingredients you’d like to add.

Melting chocolate

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The best way to melt chocolate is to use a bain-marie – or to create your own using a metal bowl suspended over a pot of boiling water. Just put the chocolate in the bowl and stir it until it’s smooth and melted. If this isn’t an option, melting in the microwave can work just as well: just make sure that you only microwave your chocolate for very shorts bursts and stir well in-between, and you can create Easter chocolate eggs that are just as smooth and delicious as those made with chocolate heated in the conventional way.

Getting cracking

You’ll need to use a mould to create your Easter chocolate eggs. Once the chocolate is properly melted, use a ladle to pour it into the mould (until it’s about a third full) and tip it gently backwards and forwards and to the side until the mould is covered, then leave it to dry. You’ll need to repeat the process – one of the easiest mistakes to make when making your own eggs is to leave the chocolate too thin. When you’ve pressed the dry chocolate halves out of their moulds, dip the edges in the melted chocolate to glue them together.

Try something new

When you’re melting the chocolate for your eggs, you might want to consider adding interesting ingredients to it to give the eggs that something special that you can only get when you’re making your own. Ginger, coconut, or nuts are all options that might work well, but keep in mind that the best eggs for kids will probably always be the ones that are made of plain chocolate! You could also try combing two types of chocolate – dark on one side and white on the other, for instance, stuck together.

Decoration

Photo: emilywjones

Fancy decorations on the eggs can be created using a few different ingredients. Making your own decorations from icing is fun, or you can buy ready-made marzipan or ‘plastic icing’ shapes that look lovely when ‘glued’ to the eggs with melted chocolate. Shapes can be iced onto the eggs, or icing equipment can be used to create designs and patterns from chocolate in a shade that contrasts with that of the egg. If you don’t try to hard to make the eggs ‘perfect’, gorgeous results can be achieved.

Egged on

It may seem like a lot of effort is involved in making your own Easter chocolate eggs when they’re going to end up costing more than the shop-bought ones, but if you make sure that you use good-quality, 70% cocoa chocolate and a lot of creativity, it’s possible to create something really special that simply couldn’t be bought in stores.