Chocolate Easter egg nests

Children will love giving you a hand in making these during the Easter holidays. They are very simple and easy to make and look great. They will get a real sense of pride in having made these. As with anything involving children, saucepans, hobs, and heated ingredients, keep a close eye on everything.

Ingredients

• 5¼ ounces / 150g Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal
• 8¾ ounces / 250g milk chocolate
• 1¾ ounces / 50g butter
• 2 tablespoons of Golden Syrup
• mini Easter eggs

Method

Prepare a 12-hole muffin tray with paper muffin cases.

Melt the butter in a saucepan.

Add the Golden Syrup.

Break the chocolate up into squares and add it to the saucepan.

As soon as the chocolate starts to melt, turn off the heat but start stirring it in allowing the warmth of the butter and golden syrup to do the melting. Continue stirring until it is perfectly smooth.

Break up the Shredded Wheat cereal bars into a bowl.

Add the melted chocolate mixture.

Thoroughly mix the Shredded Wheat and chocolate with a spatula.

Then, spoon out the mixture to distribute it evenly between the paper cases.

Press you thumb into the centre of the mixture in each case to make a small hollow ‘nest’ big enough to take two or three (the more the merrier) mini Easter eggs (see picture).

Put the muffin tray in the fridge for an hour or so to allow the mixture to set.

After removing from the fridge, make sure each muffin case can be rotated in its tray hole. This ensures you’ve not got any overflow of chocolate sticking to the sides. Remove them from the tray.

Then, fill each nest with as three or four of the mini eggs, depending on how many each will take.

Tips

You can use other kinds of breakfast cereal instead of Shredded Wheat. Shredded Wheat is good because it already  has the appearance of nest material.

Trivia

Easter eggs of one sort or another go back centuries. There is a reference in the 1307 household accounts of King Edward I of England to “18 pence for 450 eggs to be boiled and dyed or covered with gold leaf and distributed to the Royal Household”. In the 19th century, master craftsmen like Carl Fabergé made elaborate jewelled eggs for wealthy clients, most notably for the Russian Royal Family. The first chocolate eggs started appearing in France and Germany in the 19th century. Most of these early eggs were solid because they had not at that point found a way of successfully moulding chocolate except painstakingly one at a time by hand. Although the British chocolatier, John Cadbury, had created his first ‘French eating chocolate’ in 1842 he was not sufficiently impressed with the results to manufacture it. So the first Cadbury Easter eggs did not appear until 1875, by which time they had discovered how to make melted chocolate flow into moulds.

Actress Sue Johnston loves tucking in to Cadbury’s mini eggs while bingeing on DVD box sets.