Doing Stuff is Fun: Easter egg hunt

Easter is a wonderful time for children to play games that reward them with chocolate eggs. But why should kids have all the fun? I've decided to host and Easter egg hunt for grown ups.

First I had to get some Easter Eggs. and by get, I mean make, using moulds I acquired from Pound World and Lakeland. I also got set of Easter themed cookie cutter from the 99p store.

I had two sizes of plastic mould for chocolate eggs. I did the big eggs one layer at a time, painting on a layer of melted chocolate then letting it set in the fridge for an hour or so before painting on the next layer. Once my two halves were finished I took them out of the moulds and used white chocolate to stick them together. Then I smoothed over the join with a hot teaspoon.

I made the small ones solid chocolate, which is much easier. I set the first half of eggs then filled up some more moulds, pressing the set half into the wet half. We made milk chocolate eggs, white chocolate eggs (and sprinkled some of the moulds with cocoa powder first to get that speckled look) and dark chocolate eggs. James put raisins in the dark chocolate eggs and he put rum in some of them, but I don't know how he dealt with the clumping thing because I wasn't there.

While I was waiting for all the chocolate to set we made egg shaped cookies (gingerbread). My initial plan was to ice them all pretty, but then I had a better idea - it would be more fun for the guys (and easier for me) to set up a gingerbread decorating station so they could do their own decorating once they'd found them.

Finally I got around to using my silicone moulds for Easter Egg Cakes. I made up some sponge cake mix and filled the silicone moulds with it. I covered the mould in foil to deter rising; it didn't work but there wasn't a proper crust on top and that made it much easier to trim them down. Once cooled I glued the eggs together with cream cheese frosting. I drizzled chocolate (milk and white) over them to reinforce the seam and to make them look pretty.

We wrapped all of our eggs in foil and hid them about the house.

And we had these empty plastic ones I found in the 99p store so we used those too - we hid a few about with clues to the other eggs, and little chick as well.

Our friends had fun hunting for the eggs, we had a brilliant time watching them search and it seems the gingerbread decorating station may have been a stroke of genius.