HOW TO MAKE EASTER EGGS
It’s going to be a different kind of Easter this year. Communing with family over Zoom or Houseparty isn’t quite the same as breaking bread across a table. And how will parents explain the Easter Bunny’s blatant disregard for lockdown protocols?
But there is one thing that will remain a constant at Easter, no matter what: love. Just kidding, it’s Jesus. Nope, kidding again, it’s chocolate. Religious or not, we’ve all given up a lot for Lent this year and we’ve earned the right to eat lots and lots of chocolate.
Making your own Easter eggs is neither required nor necessarily recommended at this time but it is possible.
Some of you probably panic-bought chocolate but many of you probably panic-ate it. In any case, getting chocolate isn’t the issue we’re all facing — it’s filling the hours and hours of existential dread, sky-rocketing anxiety levels and/or relentless parenting with fiddly and otherwise prohibitively time-consuming activities.
The first thing you have to do when making Easter eggs is let go of any expectation they might look good. Most of you won’t have Easter egg chocolate moulds just sitting in the cupboard so you will be going rogue. Some of your creations might resemble eggs but most won’t and that’s okay. They’ll be “rustic”.
You can make your own mould by wrapping a few layers of tinfoil around an existing egg — creating a mould of half that egg. Tinfoil moulds are not going to give you a smooth finish to your egg though — it’s going to have lots of little lines and indentations, so just accept that.
If you can’t accept that, you should probably opt for a filled egg that you can coat with chocolate. There are lots of recipes for homemade filled eggs — but the one that appealed to me was by Sam from sugarspunrun. com, because it’s “generations-old” and has a potatobased filling. What?
It sounds odd but when you add mountains of sugar to potato, it ceases to be potato and transforms into sweet, sweet starch. The filling calls for half a cup of mashed potato, half a cup of butter, five-plus cups of icing sugar and two teaspoons of vanilla extract. I hear your gasps but, regrettably, due to the lockdown, sugar consumption restrictions are cancelled.
After you’ve chilled the filling, shape it into eggs and refrigerate those while you prepare your chocolate.
Let’s talk tempering. Tempering chocolate, I have learned, is very important to the chocolate-making community. If you don’t do it, your chocolate will still be edible but it might be a bit granular and get a white coating, which is widely frowned upon.
Some methods require a candy thermometer and are very finicky about temperatures but we are in a pandemic here, people, so we do not have the patience or resources for those methods. Instead, keep it simple, melt two-thirds of your chocolate in a double boiler, remove it from the heat, add the remaining chocolate and pray for the desired consistency.
Now you can use your tempered chocolate to either fill your janky tinfoil mould, make drizzly shapes on baking paper or coat your potato eggs. If you figure out a way to do the latter without having them end up with a flat side, you’re a better person than I am.
Obviously these instructions are wildly incomplete but you either have time to stuff it up and start again or you have kids, in which case they will stuff them up anyway.
Whether your finished product is a work of art or a contender for #nailedit online galleries, no one will care because there is no one to give them to except the people you live with and we are way past the point of caring about what the people in our bubble think of us. We are finally free of expectations and armed with homemade potato chocolates.