No Eggsactly perfect results (Lakeland Easter Egg Moulds)

Member Name: azana

Product:	Lakeland Easter Egg Moulds
Date:	14/04/09 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Make your own eggs with your favourite chocolate

Disadvantages: Fiddly

At Easter time in my family we tend to get a bit carried away in a frenzy of chocolate and doing crafty things badly. Last Easter we purchased these egg moulds, and made eggs, with suprisingly not bad results, as in they were edible and didn't look too awful.

Lakeland always sell slightly unusual Easter items and we purchased these moulds for about the same price as an Easter egg - £3 at the time, though they are currently £3.46, and available online and in the Lakeland stores.
When we bought our moulds we also bought some cellophane Easter bags from Lakeland to package the finished article.

The mould set consisted of 4 larger egg moulds and 4 sheets of 18 little half egg shapes, to make 2 large eggs and 36 small eggs at the same time should you wish (hope my maths is right there). There were also full instructions with the moulds as to how to make your own eggs.

Now clearly I wasn't expecting Hotel Chocolat results, but Dairy Milk being on offer at the time at Morrisons, and the days being long and rainy I was prepared to give it a go. I thought it would be a fairly fun activity and perhaps cut down on the amount of packaged eggs we bought.

Using the moulds:

We had to melt the chocolate carefully - I found a bain marie (aka saucepan with hot water and a bowl in) worked best, you could microwave but if you overheat the chocolate is ruined easily. We didn't want to waste good chocolate so we melted the chocolate carefully.
For the smaller eggs you pour the chocolate straight into the moulds and tap to release the bubbles and then chill.
The larger eggs were more tricky - we had to brush the inside with chocolate to build up layers, five in all. This took time and patience but we managed to make one each for the grannies in our family.
The finished eggs popped out of the mould fairly easy and the moulds were ready to use the next year.

Finishing your eggs:

We had to stick the eggs together using melted chocolate, which was fine with the big eggs and produced a rather strange shape for the little eggs in some cases. As half eggs the smaller eggs made nice cake decorations so weren't a complete failure.

Overall:

I would recommend this set, though less packaged eggs are now available, it was fun to use. The advantage is that you can make your eggs from your favourite chocolate and as thickly as you like, though using the moulds does make me have renewed respect for proper chocolatiers - it is clearly an art. It probably doesn't work out much cheaper to make your own eggs but at least the grannies' eggs were original, especially once decorated with sweets, and they were duly presented on Easter Sunday with much assurance as to the hygienic manner in which they had been produced. I would give this product 4 stars as essentially it is quite pricey for a bit of moulded plastic.
We did enjoy having a go at making our own eggs so I would recommend this set, like many Lakeland products it is a bit different.

Summary: How we made our own chocolate Easter eggs