More Easter goodness

I decided to upcycle the old favourite rocky road easter egg with a version containing honeycomb, marshmallow, popcorn and toasted coconut. I'll think about including a chewy chocolate or coconut jelly perhaps, when I find a good recipe for those firm jelly sweets...

The honeycomb was great to make but just a little bit scary dealing with the hot toffee mixture. I got my recipe from the Darren Purchese book, Lamingtons & Lemon Tart, a good basic recipe containing honey, would you believe, and it was terrific. 200g sugar, 80ml liquid glucose and 40g honey dissolved in 2 Tb water in a saucepan over a medium heat. Then, without stirring, it boiled till just turning golden. Then quickly stirred in 2 tsp bicarb soda till it frothed up crazily. And poured it onto a glad-bake lined tray. Remember, it is SUPER HOT and will BURN as the temperature is well over 100°C.

 

Then came the homemade marshmallows, I had to tweak my recipe a bit to make the mixture a little firmer as the first time, the marshmallow broke up when it was mixed with the other ingredients.

To make them, place 3/4 C sugar and 1/4 C cold water and beat well, then add 1 tsp vanilla essence. Then add 1/4 C boiling water in which 3 tsp gelatine has been dissolved. And continue beating until super thick, then spread on a tray to about a 3cm thickness. When set cut into cubes and roll in cornflour.  Then combine 100g (half the batch) with 1 C popped popcorn and 2 Tb toasted coconut.

  

Add in 2 C of the broken up honeycomb.  I used 200g dark chocolate to make the easter egg shells. And melted 150g milk chocolate to mix through the ingredients to make the rocky road.

 

When filled, some white chocolate (75g) was drizzled over the top.

A hit with the kids at school. With the leftover popcorn, we made caramel popcorn and that was a definite winner. Popcorn is born for caramel popcorn!

Wow, how many sweets can be fit into one Easter season???

An easter egg nest

I was inspired by a cake with an easter egg nest when I was trawling the internet for easter treat ideas. So I got to baking!

The individual brownie cake, which was iced with chocolate ganache, is probably a bit small for the size of the nest but you get the idea.
Simply melt 60g dark chocolate and mix it through 20g vermicelli noodles. Many varieties of vermicelli or cellophane noodles are made of mung bean starch. Make sure to use 100% rice vermicelli as it will soften slightly with the chocolate. The non-rice ones remain tough and hard to chew!
Line a muffin or patty case pan with glad wrap and put the mixture into a nest shape and let them set.

 That quantity of mixture made four.

Once it was set, it was easy to peel them off the glad wrap, fill with mini candy eggs and decorate the top of the cakes.

  

Happy Easter!

Raspberry curd

And back to the sweet stuff!

Everyone's heard of lemon curd but it was in a delicious magazine late last year, that I first came upon a recipe for raspberry curd in a "Raspberry Curd Crepe Layer Cake", originally a Stephanie Alexander recipe.