Making Easter Eggs At Hotel Cafe Royal
Excuse me whilst I get all proud like a mother hen and coo over the chocolate eggs I made. The top left yellow criss-cross and bottom left yellow swirl were made with my own fair hands - humour me and look how shiny they are! How perfect! Sorry, I'm deliriously happy because I have never made an Easter egg before, and it went well. The chocolatiers of the Hotel Cafe Royal kindly invited a group of bloggers in to show us how they make their colourful hand-crafted eggs, and let us create one of our own.
Andy, the hotel's head chocolatier, has created a unique blend that must be tasted if you're a chocolate fan! He showed us how to melt and temper it, which mostly involved pouring it over the marble counter and scraping it about whilst we all stared in a hypnotic trance, overwhelmed by the sight and smell of SO. MUCH. CHOCOLATE! Next up we had to prepare our moulds, and paint our designs straight onto them using coloured cocoa butter.
Then the chocolate pouring commenced, the most messy and fun part of the process. You have to fill each mould with warm, runny chocolate and then use a sort of scraper thing to get off the excess and make sure you have neat sides. Of course Andy made it look really easy, but we were all surprised to find out just how heavy it is to hold the full mould in one hand and do the scraping with the other.
The eggs took a surprisingly quick amount of time to set, and we all gingerly took them from their moulds and marvelled at how shiny they were, and how vibrant our 'paint' decorations looked. A huge bowl of sweets were brought out for us to fill our eggs with, and then we placed one half of the egg onto a hot saucepan to slightly melt it and then press it onto the other half to seal it.
Laura from Heroine In Heels snapped up the prize for best Easter Egg, and the lucky lass won herself an afternoon tea in the Hotel Cafe Royal's beautiful tea room.
We were also treated to some yummy cocktails as we worked. I'll admit, it did make the process a little harder towards the end...hic! But I was loving the chocolate martinis made with fresh raspberry mousse and the sharp ginger martinis.
It's not too late to bag yourself an Easter egg from Hotel Cafe Royal - these beautifully crafted wonders are £7, and the chocolate is so smooth! There are also golden tickets hidden in ten eggs (Willy Wonka style!) which will give each lucky winner a whole day of chocolate crafting with Andy. If you're feeling mega flush you can also buy their giant egg (below), a snip at £400. It will be filled with smaller eggs and a lot of those sweets. Wowzers! Thanks Hotel Cafe Royal for this amazing workshop of chocolate-crafting-boozing wonderment! What was your favourite Easter egg you got this year? Let me know in the comments x