Mahoosive Easter eggs – How do you make yours?
Huge in-store promotional Easter Eggs for E. H. Booths Ltd.
We all love our jobs at Davenport’s Chocolates – the smell of chocolate that greets you as you get to work, sampling the freshest of chocolates off the enrober and generally working as a team in our little artisan chocolate factory. But even then, some projects are just that little bit more exciting than others.
Head Chocolatier, Jane Williams is no stranger to bespoke projects – having made chocolates for a visit to her home-town from the Queen or Easter eggs for a hunt on Ant & Dec’s SM:tv LIVE (that’s showing our age! And if you can remember that then you are too). So when Booths approached us to make some extra large Easter eggs to showcase the line of flavoured Easter eggs that we produce for them – we naturally said yes. Booths were clearly thinking that bigger is better – we just weren’t expecting it to be THAT much bigger.
How to make giant Easter Eggs
You will require:
- Chocolate, lots of chocolate. In this case, mixed to a delicious honeycomb recipe that we find it difficult to stop sampling. To check it for the consistency of quality, you understand.
- A large egg mould. Ok, a “mahoosive” egg mould closing on 1 meter tall.
- A well skilled, large scale chocolatier. Fortunately, we have one of these on site – the gentle giant that is Graham “Big G” Harrison.
1. Moulding
Normally our moulding machine would suffice – it has chocolate on tap and a draining rack for excess chocolate to return to the vat from the mould being used. Sadly it is a little more conservative in size when compared to the task in hand. Instead, the prepared chocolate is poured into the mould and ‘raked’ up to the edges as it sets, using dough scrapers. Then it’s a case of lather, rinse, repeat – or chocolate, pour, repeat until some kind of structural stability is judged to have been achieved.
Final layers are allowed to drain facedown onto production tables and left to set in a deliberately cold factory room. Sorry, no heating in the production area that week (it can’t all be perks when working in a chocolate factory).
2. Decoration
In this case, it was very like many of our other more manageably sized Easter eggs – the use of white chocolate to pipe a freehand, abstract motif on one-half of the shell to lend some accent colour. With the added challenge of feeling like you are working in a giant’s chocolate factory; or that you are a borrower in a normal chocolate factory.
3. Weighing
You will require ██████ kg chocolate per shell. Each shell being exactly ███ cm tall x ███ cm wide x ███ mm thick. Weighing on average ███ kg per egg when complete. Ok, this is the bit where censorship kicks in. The whole project is essentially for a guess the weight competition. If you think you have a good idea how much these eggs might weigh then you’ll have to go on an Easter egg hunt across the Booths stores and give it a shot.
Jane and Graham weigh the finished shells.
4. Sealing and Wrapping
Another particularly fun part. Well, fraught part, if you had asked us at the time but fun now that it’s over and we’re writing this blog article up. You will require:
- an appropriately sized dolly trolley
- brilliantly up-scaled, and structurally engineered bases supplied by Booths, based on our normal sized packaging
- cellophane wrap that covers our 1.2m x 3m packing table
- a three person team (four if you want to document for posterity)
- rudimentary maypole dancing skills
Up-scaled bases that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be proud of.
Jenny conducts, while Jane and Graham align and seal the shells
Maypole dancing ensues (told you!).
5. Dispatch
With the Easter Eggs ribboned and tagged its time for dispatch via any household courier, or logistics handler that you care to put your trust in. That’s right – we delivered them personally.
Graham surveys the finished Easter eggs, and wonders if we’ve booked a big enough van.
To find out more from Booths and see the eggs ‘in person’ –
- Visit booths.co.uk or your local Booths store.
- Further info, as well as full Ts & Cs can be found at http://www.booths.co.uk/eggstremeegg-terms-and-conditions/.
- Or search Social Media with #EggstremeEgg.
If you’d like to see where we make these and even have a go for yourself –
- Check out our events page for upcoming chocolate workshops
- Or contact us to book a team building or birthday gift experience in our artisan chocolate factory.
