When I was a child, the fun thing about Easter eggs was cracking them open for the treats inside. I can't remember when this stopped being common practice, but I'm pleased to see that at least Cadbury's, with their little "gesture" eggs, seem to be starting it back up again. And Aldi's pinata egg.
It makes sense, especially if they want to cut packaging costs.
Not that it seems to be helping to reduce the cost to consumers. Admittedly, the rising cost of cacao beans doesn't help there. The majority come from West Africa, where it is not a native tree (it comes from equatorial South America), which is often riven with war and increasingly climate problems, neither of which do much for cheap chocolate. And then there's the ethics of West African deforestation, and potentially child labour, to satisfy chocolate-cravings.
To be honest, though, I prefer the flavour of Peruvian chocolate: it often has undertones of berries.
But back to Easter eggs. Most years, I get out my trusty egg-moulds, melt some chocolate, and hope I don't crack it when I'm trying to remove them from said mould.
I used to have a massive mould, which took a stupid amount of chocolate, and from which I could never remove the egg afterwards. Not cleanly, at any rate. Probably the weight of the sweets I filled it with didn't help the process.
These days I stick to the little moulds, which only require about 100g per egg, and a small bag of mini-eggs or buttons to fill.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the eggs don't crack on removal. They do, but they're much easier to fix. Really, I should colour some white chocolate to use for the 'glue', in the manner of the Japanese using gold paint to highlight cracks in porcelain and making a feature of the "fault". But I have enough trouble keeping Tiny away from one bowl of chocolate.
Naturally, it took until the fourth egg before I worked out how to get them out without breaking one or other side, but I wasn't going to melt the others down again to make them perfect. The joy of homemade things, not destined for a Handmade Stall and therefore the public, is that imperfections are part and parcel of the item. Besides, it's only going to be eaten, not put on display!
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