Faux Cadbury Creme Eggs

Just in time for Easter, make your own Cadbury eggs!

Ingredients:

1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
3 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
yellow food coloring
1 bag milk chocolate chips

First, cream together the butter, syrup, salt and vanilla. Slowly add the 3 cups of powdered sugar. It'll get super thick and you'll think you'll need to add some liquid, but it smooths itself out.



TIP: As you add the sugar, be careful not to let it poof up into a thick cloud of sugary-dust that is then sucked into the motor of your mixer, causing it to stink like fried electrical parts and resulting in a Master who says you can't use it anymore because it is ruined. Because then you will be mixer-less (sad face).

That's it. That's the Hogwarty-creation that is the magical deliciousness of the creme filling in a Cadbury egg. Who knew!

If you want it to look genuine, you can divide your creme filling, putting a small amount into a separate bowl, and add the food coloring to make the 'yolks'. We skipped this step because it just seemed like an unnecessary mess.

Now, take your filling, which is thick and very, very sticky, and try to roll it into balls. It's definitely easier to roll if you pop the bowl into the freezer for a few minutes and let it get nice and cold. The coat your hands in powdered sugar and make balls.

We had fun making balls.

More fun than is appropriate, actually.

We're strange.

Anyway.

If the mixture gets too sticky to work with, put it back in the freezer. Cold balls are best.

We lined up our balls on a cookie sheet and then stabbed them all with lollipop sticks. Again with the fun. [insert Psycho-stabbing music here]

We put the cookie sheet in the freezer while we melted the chocolate in the microwave.

If you're going with the yellow 'yolk' part, you need to first make smaller yellow balls, then somehow get that ball into the middle of the white ball. Meh. I'm lazy. Good luck!

We chose to go with the dipping chocolate method rather than trying to get the chocolate into egg molds, because, again, I'm lazy (and cheap. I wasn't going to go buy egg molds.) so I can't give you any hints on how to use molds. Needless to say, my yolk-less, nonegg-shaped, faux Cadbury eggs weren't very pretty.

We lined them up on a foil-covered cookie sheet (foil because I thought I was out of parchment paper, which would have been less sticky, and then found the parchment paper after we were done).




The dipping was difficult-ish. The warm chocolate made the balls get all gloopy and melty. They kept falling off the sticks. It became more of a 'roll it in chocolate' than actual dipping.

And we need to learn how to temper chocolate because it really didn't want to harden into a manageable shell very well. They did harden up some in the fridge, but... yeah. That part needs work.



Another part that needs work is the type of chocolate. The flavor was definitely not Cadbury-egg flavor. So next time, I would not use chocolate chips. I'm not sure exactly what I will use, though.

The finished product:



In doing bite-by-bite, side-by-side comparison with a real Cadbury egg, we determined that the filling was pretty damn close in flavor. Maybe not exact, and certainly a little bit off in texture, which I think was more a temperature thing than an ingredient thing, but close enough as to be acceptable. Because we were eating the homemade ones refrigerator-cold, and the real ones at room temp, the homemade filling felt thicker. I think at room temp, it would be the same. Unfortunately, at room temp, the homemade one's chocolate 'shell' starts to melt. Feh.

All in all, it was a great success. It was fun, and different, and Master ate about 10 of them so he obviously approved. The kids approved. Most importantly, I approve. ;-)





We ganked the recipe from here.