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.

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.