Reduce your Easter waste: Make your own chocolate eggs

Easter is approaching, and maybe you’re thinking about which delicious Easter eggs you can treat yourself and the kids to. Not to spoil your happy thoughts, but have you ever thought about how much packaging comes with the 80 million eggs that are sold in the UK each year? It’s a lot.

But there’s is one way you can indulge while saving money and avoiding unnecessary packaging-you can make your own Easter eggs.

Make your own Easter eggs

Even if you’ve never made anything remotely like a chocolate egg before, we promise you don’t need to be Jamie Oliver to do it. All you need is chocolate and a mould. If you don’t have one, they’re cheap enough to buy. Check this one out on Amazon.

• Start off by thinly coating the inside of the mould with some oil (non-flavoured). This will help you get the chocolate out of the mould more easily.
• To get the best results, temper the chocolate. If you’re not Mary Berry, this means that you should heat the chocolate and then cool it. This makes it easier to mould and it also helps to separate the cocoa solids.

How to temper chocolate

• Fill a saucepan with an inch of water, and rest a metal bowl on the saucepan
• Put the chocolate into the bowl (keeping some aside)
• Bring the water to a simmer, don’t boil it
• Stir the chocolate until it’s melted
• Use a thermometer and bring the temperature to 48C for dark chocolate or 45C for milk chocolate
• Remove the bowl of chocolate from the saucepan
• Add in the chocolate you kept back (hopefully you didn’t eat it!). This will reduce the temperature of the chocolate. Stir the chocolate until it reaches 32C for dark chocolate, or 30C for milk chocolate
• If the temperature drops too low, gently reheat it over the saucepan again until it’s EXACTLY 32C for dark chocolate or 30C for milk chocolate. Even 1C of variation can render the chocolate useless, so be precise!
• Pour your chocolate into your moulds, and make sure you build layers until you get a good layer of chocolate. You’ll have to wait for 20 minutes or so for the chocolate layers to set
• Make sure the sides have a clean edge so that both sides of the egg will stick together
• Release the egg sides from the mould. Try not to handle them too much in case the heat from your hands melts the chocolate
• To get both sides of the egg to stick together, heat a baking sheet and place the two sides against it for a few seconds. Press the two sides together gently.

If you’ve tried and failed to make your own Easter eggs, or you just don’t have time, and you have to resort to buying them from the supermarket, choose the egg with the least packaging or one that has the most recyclable packaging you can find. Happy environmentally-friendly Easter!