Eton Mess Easter Eggs

It's nearly time for my third annual Easter Egg Hunt. I make chocolate eggs, but I also like to mix things up a bit. The first year I made eggs out of sponge cake and gingerbread.

The second year I designed and added cheesecake eggs and millionaire's shortbread eggs to the mix. That's when I decided to undertake a 'new egg challenge' each year.

This year's new egg challenge is Eton Mess, inspired by this egg sold by Lidl. Theirs is white chocolate with meringue pieces and dried fruit but mine will be a hard meringue shell filled with whipped cream and strawberry pieces (which is closer to actual Eton Mess). Today is my first test run.

I've never made hard meringue before so I looked up a few recipes and learned that I just have to bake it really really slowly at gas mark 1/2 for about and hour and a half, then turn the oven off and leave the meringue in there until it's cool. It's not really baking, so much as drying it out.

So anyway, I start by making up 1 egg of meringue.

And I spoon it into my silicone egg moulds to make shells. I have a few designs, so I'm trying them all to decide which is best.

I go to put it in the oven. This is when I learn I can't set my oven to less than mark 1. Plus it's still a little warm from my dinner. So I set it to mark 1 for 15 minutes and then turn it off, leaving the meringues to cool for an hour and a half. But then they're still a little bit soft so I put it back on gas mark 1 for 30 minutes and leave inside the oven  to cool again.

And now they're cooled and hard, time to find out if I can get them out of the moulds without breaking them. Must be very, very careful.

Aww I broke one. Sadface. Looking at the outside of the shells, I think I've let the oven be on for too long. Next time I'll do the first bit for 30 minutes and not do a second bit.

Now for the filling. I whip up some double cream and chop some strawberries. The strawberries go in the cream and I mix 'em both together.

Now I put the filling in the shells and use edible glue to stick the two egg halves together.

Time for the tasting.  

Not bad, though the meringue is a little overcooked, but this is why I do test runs. I think the optimum meringue to cream ratio is the blue mould, so that's what I'll use. Now the others can go in the fridge and I go to bed. 

Night night.

Roman Blind

This blind came with the house. It's in our bedroom, which is at the front on the ground floor, so the massive gaps in it just won't do. And that's why there's been a blanket covering the thing since we moved in.

 

Time for a new one. One that doesn't have gaps in the first place so they can't get bigger. I'm going to make a Roman Blind.

I need sticks of some kind that will go across the blind horizontally. These are called batterns. I've been to the 99p store and bought this trellis. I need to take it apart. It's held together with these little plastic knob thingies; I just pull them out so I'm left with a bunch of sticks.

They're not long enough so I'll need to stick them together. I glue cocktail sticks inside to make them more stable. They don't need to be very strong - they won't be taking any weight, they're just there to help the blind keep its shape.

And then I trim them down so they'll fit.

I need a big piece of fabric. As luck would have it, we have way too many bedding sets (and nowhere to keep them all) so I can use a duvet cover.

I want my batterns to be 27cm apart, with an extra 4cm above the top one. I turn the duvet inside out and mark where they'll go before gluing them down.

My duvet cover is too wide for the window so I need to trim it down. I trim one side and glue a new edge on.

I found some curtain rings in Wilkinsons, which I'll use as guides for the cords. I'll sew them in at regular intervals across where the sticks are. The rings will be on the outside of the finished blind (on the back). The stitches go around the batterns to make sure they stay put. I do the bottom battern first, and turn the blind right side out as I go.

Next I need to attach my blind to its window. I've been to B&Q for some wood. My top piece is two bits, which I've glued together and cut to size. I trim the corners so it will fit around the picture rail. Then I glue the top of the blind to the wood and staple the corners in place at the back. I glue a final row of curtain rings to the wood and secure with staples. While I've got my stapler out, I use it to secure to join between the two wood pieces as well. And I screw the wood to the window frame.

Now it's in place, I attach the last battern to the bottom edge of my blind, using the windowsill as a guide. This one's made from wood, also from B&Q, because I wanted something a little bit heavier to weigh the blind down. I glue it to the lining then chop off the bottom of the fabric. I glue the fabric to the bottom of the stick. Once it's dry I trim the excess.

Finally, I need something stringy to use as the pull cord. I know! I'll use some string. I get 4 pieces of string and tie them each to a bottom loop. Then I feed the string vertically through all the other loops, and once at the top I feed them all to the left. I tie them just outside the top left hand ring so they'll stay together.

And when I try to open the blind, the top rings just fall off :( I guess gluing them in place wasn't going to do the trick. I need to figure out a plan B.

I went to Wilkos and got these little screw-hook things and screwed them into the wood by hand. And I thread the cords back through and tie them together. To open it, I just have to pull on the cord. To keep it open, I wrap the cord around this bit that was there to hold up the original blind.

Well, it works. It's not perfect; that's because I made it quickly without all the obsessive measuring and re-measuring that you're supposed to do. Maybe I'll be a bit more careful when I make one of these for a house I actually own.

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.

Not only that, but we received a little surprise of our own, which one of our guests kindly secreted inside James's Lego head.