BS: Empty Easter eggs

Subject: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 21 Apr 14 - 05:25 PM

When I was a child we had chocolate Easter eggs with chocolates inside. Even a few years ago some of the run-of-the-mill Easter eggs in supermarkets and newsagents had the treats inside. Now they all seem to be an empty egg and a chocolate bar somewhere in the packet.
Where is the fun in that?
I dare say that if I was to go to an expensive specialist chocolate emporium I could get a proper Easter egg with a surprise INSIDE it, but I feel sorry for all the people (and not just children) who are being deprived of a simple pleasure.

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Apr 14 - 05:57 PM

Let's face it, the quality of those things is irredeemably shite. Make your own - melt chocolate, temper it, mould it. Let it cool in the fridge. Do the same for the filling choccies, reserve some of the melted choc for closing and add cream and kirsch to the rest, whip it up and fill the choccies. Then close them with the rest, melted and tempered again. Whip up some white chocolate mousse to fill the entire centre of the outer eggs, dunking the choccies en route, and allow to cool. Make up and enjoy.

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 21 Apr 14 - 06:20 PM

In the fifties, there used to be a magical shop in Windsor which sold only chocolate, in the form of any and every thing you could imagine. Chocolate rabbits, sheep, people, flowers, gnomes; and not just at Easter time, all year round. The chocolate was of superb quality and very expensive. But all the items were hollow. I wonder if that shop is still there?

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Apr 14 - 06:53 PM

These folks?

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: Ebbie
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 02:17 AM

Guest 5:57, what is "temper"? (melt chocolate, temper it, mould it.)

Your suggestions sound like fun.

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: Megan L
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 02:34 AM

Tempering chocolate is necessary to prevent it from blooming(That dull slightly dusty look). It is a process of heating and cooling and working the chocolate which allows crystals to realign giving shiny crisp chocolate. One thing the guest though is something I was taught never to do and that is putting it in the fridge.

tempering by Lindt

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 02:56 AM

Guest, how marvellous you found that link! Looking at the site of the shop nowadays, it must been relocated, because it was on the main street and very tiny. But I should imagine it's the same people. Thank you very much!

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: Musket
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 04:09 AM

I bought Mrs Musket a huge Easter egg that weighed, according to the label 1Kg. I assumed it contained something.

Wrong.

1Kg of egg.....

Mrs Musket is a health fascist so I was in trouble for the nice thought anyway. That said, we cracked it open last night and had a nibble. At her rate of doling it out, we'll still be eating it at Christmas.......   (Leith School of cookery. Lovely chocolate...)

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 04:35 AM

To temper chocolate, you need a cook's thermometer. There's a lot of useful stuff available from Lakeland in the UK.

In the technique which follows, I'll always give three figures, separated by | - these are for dark, milk and white chocolate respectively. Also, don't wash the thermometer between stages, you don't want to get water in the chocolate.

Bulk tempering
1. Put 1/4 of the chocolate aside and melt the rest at 55-58C/131-136F | 45-50C/113-122F | 45-50C/113-122F, stirring slowly to ensure it doesn't stick and burn on the bottom of the pan. Take it off the heat.
2. Pour off 2/3 of the the melted chocolate into a bowl, and add the 1/4 reserved to it. Wait for the temperature to drop to 28-29C/82-84F | 27-28C/81-82F | 26-27C/79-81F. If any chocolate remains unmelted at this stage, remove it to stop the chocolate thickenening by overcrystallising in the next stage.
3. Pour back onto the remaining 1/3 of the melted chocolate, and if necessary gently heat it to 30-32C/88-90F | 29-30C/84-86F | 28-29C/82.84F. It's now tempered and ready to pour into moulds, Don't raise its temperature above this again or you'll lose the temper.


This is the flashy kind of tempering used by chefs to show off. You need a cold marble surface and a flexible thin steel spatula at least 8"/20cm long.
The technique works by pre-seeding some of the chocolate the rest will crystallise around.
1. Melt all the chocolate at the temperature shown in stage 1 above.
2. Pour 2/3 of it onto the cold marble and move around using a spatula or scraper until it starts to thicken - the temperature drops 4-5C. Chocolate dropped from the stirrer stands proud in peaks.
3. This is now pre-seeded, pour it back into the rest, and mix. Again, you may need to gently reheat it, but be careful with the temperature.
5. Dip a cold knife tip in to check, it should harden evenly in about 3 minutes at a room temperature of 20C.

Although it is preferable not to use a fridge, we are dealing with readers in the US whose ambient temperature can be of the order of the temperatures shown, making working difficult if not impossible without doing so.

And yes, folks, I had the privilege of completing Cadbury's linear programming for their recipe for them!

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 04:53 AM

Whoops: second section lost its title, somehow: "Marble tempering"

And once done, send some to the combattants on other threads to remind them to make love, not war!

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 09:29 AM

One other temperature from the Callebaut YouTube microwave: the point at which the crystallisation breakdown happens is 34C for dark, just 2C over the point at which it starts to happen. I'd presume similar for the others, so keep things below 32 and 31 for milk and white to keep the temper.

A number of chocolate suppliers exists, Valrhona for example, but they are difficult to find: I like Callebaut, which I can get from Makro.

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 10:18 AM

My husband is an Ivorian, and, when standing beside the sweets shelves in the supermarket, always announces in a loud voice "Chocolate! Cote d'Ivoire!" Quite a bit of the raw chocolate produce does come from there. He once found a rather scraggy coconut in Tesco's which actually had Produce of Ivory Coast on the label. It was embarrassing trying to stop him from waving it about declaring it to be "Ivorian, like me!"
It's worth noting that many of the cacao (chocolate bean) growers treat their workers appallingly. Many are young boys, and they're locked into sheds at night to stop them running away. Fair Trade merely means the actual growers are paid fairly for their stuff. But it doesn't investigate particularly the conditions of the actual plantation workers. Their parents, facing near-starvation, 'sell' them to these men for a few pennies. It's little short of slavery.

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 02:58 PM

I can remember being very dissapointed on finding out my first Easter Egg wasn't made of solid chocolate.

Dave H

Subject: RE: BS: Empty Easter eggs
From: GUEST,Patsy
Date: 22 Apr 14 - 04:01 PM

Dave Hanson I can relate to that. I too was a little bit disappointed to find that it wasn't a thicker chocolate when I first opened one but can you imagine the households up and down the country coping with children who had been over indulging in solid chocolate eggs for most of the day! Yuck!

Having two children of my own I became disappointed to find that the chocolate companies were beginning not to fill their eggs. That was part of the fun for me as a child cracking open an egg to get the contents out on Easter morning. However I have noticed a trend with today's more expensive eggs decorating the exterior with a textured front to compensate which looks delicious but it still does not compare with excitement of opening the egg to see inside, to me anyway.