After about a decade and a half, I finally found a reason to try my hand at making Easter eggs again. I decided to pull out my old Easter Egg moulds and dust them off. Well maybe not dust, but chocolate them off. Making chocolate bunnies and other animals is a slow business, but a young person who loves chocolate will normally appreciate your effort and admire your handiwork – and then eat it of course.
Cleaning Chocolate Moulds
Never take water to chocolate moulds. Water tarnishes chocolates, keep it well away from your chocolate and moulds. To clean, get a dish cloth and some patience, and polish them until they look clean. It takes a bit of patience, but it won’t be too long before they look as good as new.
If you have a selection of dirty moulds you might need quite a few dish cloths.
Melting the Chocolate
You must buy cooking chocolate. If you buy proper chocolate, it will be horrible when it sets again. The cooking chocolate in the supermarket isn’t too bad, but you can get some lovely imported cooking chocolate at speciality shops – if you can find one.
Take a pot of water and heat it on the stove.
Put the broken up pieces of chocolate into a separate bowl, that is larger than the pot, so there is no risk of water, or even steam, getting into the chocolate.
Stir the chocolate until it is runny. With white chocolate, remove it from the pot straight away. If it overheats, it will get hard again, and will be very difficult to work. Brown and dark chocolate is much less fussy.
If you’re really careful you can try heat it in the microwave, but use Medium, not high, and stir often – don’t let it get too hot.
Filling Moulds
For sweetie moulds, use a teaspoon to fill the sweetie shapes in the mould. Then take a toothpick and work the chocolate into the corners, and try to get rid of any bubbles.
When you’re happy that there are no bubbles, place the mould onto a flat surface in the fridge. It should take no more than an hour to fully set, but you can speed it up by putting it in the deep freeze.
Hollow Moulds
You will need:
- Two sides of the mould that fit together
- Clothes pegs, 5 or 6 per mould.
Moulds often come on a single sheet of plastic. Cut the plastic to separate them. But make sure you have at least an inch of plastic left all round the edge of the shape you’re making. This overlap allows you to fasten the two sides together with pegs.
If there are matching bobbles on the moulds, they are incredibly useful with matching up the two sides of the mould, so keep them attached to the mould if you can.
Fill one side of the mould approximately two-thirds full, with good runny chocolate. Use a toothpick to make sure you get the chocolate into any nooks and crannies like ears and noses.
Then carefully align the opposite mould over the one you filled. Try to the edges fit as well as possible if you don’t want steps in the resulting rabbit.
Peg the two sides together with clothes pegs.
Then roll the closed mould, watching, to ensure you fill all the areas of the second mould. Keep rolling. As long as the chocolate is still warm, it is going to continue to try and settle. So you need to keep changing which is the bottom. You should feel it starting to cool after about 5 minutes.
Now put it in the fridge for about half a minute, then turn it. Repeat as often as you can for about 10 minutes. After that, the chocolate should be too cool to move any more.
Removing from the Mould
After some time – perhaps an hour or more or less – you will start to notice dull areas in the mould in the fridge. This is the chocolate starting to pull away from the mould. This is an indication that it is ready to be removed from the mould.
Take the mould out of the fridge and remove the pegs. Now, ever so gently, little by little, start to lift the top mould away from the bottom. Your objective here is to make the dull areas grow. As you worry it and work it, you should see the dull area get bigger. Work around this area and it will be least likely to crack.
If you are battling to get the dull area to grow, it might be too soon. Put the mould back in the fridge for a bit longer.
Troubleshooting
Argh it cracked!
Don’t despair, this is a very common outcome. Even with experience, you will have a number of failures.
Chocolate too Thin
This is the most common problem. You normally find that the chocolate is thick on one side and too thin on the other.
- The chocolate wasn’t runny enough, so the top of the mould never got a good covering
- You didn’t roll the mould enough – try to picture what the chocolate is doing in there, and roll, roll, roll
- You put it in the fridge too quickly – it was still too warm, so when the mould stopped moving, the chocolate settled
The Mould Separates into Two Halves
It is normal to concentrate on even rolling over and over, but you need to also make sure it fills over the join. Don’t only roll over and over, but also roll head to toe – if you can visualise what that means.
Bubbles
For sweeties, and for moulds where there is a complicated bit on one side only, use a tooth pick to worry the chocolate into the corners.
For hollow moulds, ears and nose are tricky. Toothpick the first side to remove bubbles. But you can’t do that on the second side. Concentrate on rolling slowly into the tricky areas while the chocolate is still very runny. If you roll the chocolate in too fast it will bubble, so watch it and take is slow.
Broken Necks
Tall bunnies often narrow over the neck area, and then go wide again at the head. It is very difficult to get the head evenly filled, the body evenly filled, and also get the neck area thick enough. It takes a lot of practice. Even when I was doing it regularly, I used to have numerous failures with these.
Unless you are very particular about having a chocolate in this shape, rather go for different shapes that do not have necks or other narrow areas.
Try Again
Don’t try and repair your failures. It just makes a mess. Rather figure out what went wrong and then chuck the chocolate back in the melting pot, and try again, learning fro your mistakes.
It is a craft. It takes a long time and care so just practice.