Easter Egg Cakes cooked in Egg Shells!

I absolutely adored the edible ‘turtle’ eggs I saw at the Tate & Lyle Tasting house earlier in the week, I also fell head over heels in love with the gingerbread creations. The only logical thing to do…. combine the two ideas with an Easter twist!

I used the new Tate & Lyle Taste Experience Dark Muscovado sugar in my gingerbread. It added a very moreish quality and gave the gingerbread a deep rich flavour, I would definitely recommend trying it out!

To make the Easter Eggs

Start by carefully making a small hole in the end of an egg, I used a sterilised needle.

Then carefully make the hole ever so slightly larger using the needle, or your fingers if you can pinch tiny bits.

Next I used a cocktail stick to break up the egg inside it’s shell. Drain out over a bowl, I washed out the eggs at this stage.

Decorating your Easter Eggs

Decorating eggs couldn’t be a simpler, all you need is approx 1/2 cup of room temperature water, add in about 1 Tbsp vinegar and then food colouring.

Dip your eggs in the colouring and keep turning until you have reached the desired shade. I used my handy egg dipper to pick them up. Place them on kitchen paper to dry.

Gingerbread Recipe

Of course you can fill the eggs with whatever cake takes your fancy, but if you like yummy squidgy gingerbread then this recipe is great.

100g/ 4oz Butter
100g/ 4oz Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup
100g/ 4oz Tate & Lyle Treacle
100g/ 4oz Tate & Lyle Taste Experience Dark Muscovado Sugar
275g/ 10oz Self Raising Flour
2 Tsp Ground Ginger
1 Tsp Ground Cinnamon
2 Beaten Eggs
225ml/ 7 to 8 floz Milk

Melt the butter, syrup, treacle and sugar gently in a pan. Leave to cool slightly.

Sieve together the flour, ginger and cinnamon.

Add the melted sugar mixture to the flour and beat.

Beat in the egg and milk.

Filling the Egg Shells

Preheat the oven to 160C/ 325F/ Gas Mark 3

Take each on your dyed eggs and wrap the base in a square of foil with the hole facing upwards. Place them gently into a muffin tin.

Fill a piping bag with your cake mixture and carefully pipe the cake batter into the hole in your egg.

Try to fill the eggs about 3/4 of the way up.

Bake them for about 20 minutes. If some of the cake oozes out of the top (as it did on a few of mine) then just nip those pieces off with your fingers.

Leave to cool and then present in an egg box 🙂

 

Christmas Traditions & Festive Biscuit Icing Recipe!

Christmas is a time for traditions both large and small. Some of these are followed en masse such as Christmas cards, but far more are personal to individual families.

In my house we have stockings before breakfast, but we do not, not under any circumstances touch any of our ‘main’ presents until after lunch. We also have a small present in the evening, my Mum used to call these Tree Presents and it really helped to spread gift giving throughout the day. In contrast to this, one of my friends has a long standing tradition of giving a gift late on Christmas Eve. To both of us these little customs seem essential to our day and Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without them.

Charles Dickens is often credited with creating Christmas as we know it today. But in his time people rarely shopped for gifts or decorated their homes far in advance. Charles’ own daughter Mary ‘Mamie’ recounted how her father would take his children every Christmas Eve to a toy shop in London, where they were allowed to select their Christmas gifts. She also mentions that the family did not give presents outside of their own home, resources not allowing for the generosity they might have wished to share otherwise.

It was during the Victorian era as a whole that many of the rules of Christmas were defined. Houses had always been decorated with greenery but the Christmas Tree did not become common in British homes until the mid 1800s, after an 1848 edition of the Illustrated London News showed the Queen and her family around their tree. The Victorians also observed many customs that are rarely celebrated in the modern age, how many of us take down the Christmas tree almost immediately? This would have puzzled our ancestors exceedingly as Christmas Day is only the first day of Christmas and technically there are twelve days leading up to ‘Twelth Night’. This used to be a great period of celebration but now these days often go by unmentioned.

For many of our parents stockings meant an Orange hidden in the toe rather than the elaborate gifts which ‘Father Christmas’ seems to have been favouring of late. I myself grew up in a small country village and I mourn the loss of Christingle Walks with our neighbours, Church Bells on Christmas Eve and other signs that Christmas was nearly here.

If nothing else though the loss of past traditions does at least hold an opportunity to create some new customs. So this year that is precisely what my family and I intend to do.

We plan on making ridiculously large quantities of Gingerbread with the kids. These will be decorated by hand with a fabulous biscuit icing which sets hard. Then placed into gift bags and given out to friends and neighbours.

Gingerbread works particularly well for this project, but any other roll out style of biscuit works too. If you’d like to give them a go the icing recipe is below.

What are some of your favourite Christmas traditions?

Biscuit Icing

10 oz/ 280g Icing Sugar

2Tbsp = 3Tsp Dried Egg White Powder

4 Tbsp Cool water

Mix the icing sugar, egg white powder and water together until smooth.

Colour small quantities  to ice your biscuits. The icing will set hard over several hours (we leave ours overnight).