Saturday 21 April 2012

Easter Treats

Easter has come and gone but I wanted to describe the lovely goodies I made for the kids this year. I should firstly apologise for the long absence of posts. I could make all kinds of excuses here, busy life etc, but the truth is the last few months have been a bit of a struggle. Sometimes its hard to keep going with the work-load and I've been feeling a bit stressed. The blog, as much as I enjoy the writing, is at the bottom of a long list of priorities and so it got neglected since Christmas. However, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to describe the deliciously rich chocolate! And I'm back in the swing of it now so there will be no more droughts!!

Last year at Easter, chocolate was completely abandoned in favour of two furry friends, Rocket and Hopper. Unfortunately, our lovely floppy-eared bunnies passed away in November from an unknown illness. Nobody tells you until it's too late that rabbits are notoriously fragile! I was really upset about it at the time, feeling totally responsible, but the vet assured me that it is a common occurrence for them to "just die". Our lovely neighbour's cat died at the same time so it seemed that there was some virus or infection about. We made them a nice burial place and decorated it with pretty stones, but they are much missed, they were such lovely pets.

This year, I mulled over whether it was worth taking a risk at making some sugar-free chocolate, having been on the diet for well over a year. I did some searching on SCD websites and many of them declared cocoa butter to be SCD legal but not cocoa powder. It's necessary to combine both to make chocolate so a bit of thought, consideration and judgement was involved. Eventually I decided to try it. I managed to find organic 100% cacao butter (it's called cacao when it's 100% cocoa) and organic 100% cacao powder in my local health-food shops. Weirdly enough, one shop had the butter and the other shop had the powder but neither had both!! The powder was actually from a company in Dublin www.natashaslivingfood.ie. The results were so good that I had to keep going back to the shop to re-stock! I believe I bought their entire stock of cacao butter!

Making the chocolate was surprisingly easy but the actual process of trying to make a hollow egg using a mould was very tricky!! I found a large mould in Art & Hobby shop a few months back and then a good friend noticed smaller moulds in Tesco in their Easter range. The large one was so hard to use, I had to swirl the chocolate around the mould for AGES!! And then try to chill it, then add more choc, then swirl again, then chill again - you get the picture! So in the end, only ONE large egg was made! The Tesco moulds were silicone and much easier to use, and then on Easter Saturday I found tiny teddy-bear moulds in Homestore & More. They were very cheap and so easy to use, no swirling involved!! The moulds can also be used with cake batter, I made banana-cake eggs for little Einstein as well as his very small allocation of chocolate.

The basic recipe is:

100g Cocoa Butter (not that easy to find but try good health food shops and online)
6 Tablespoons Cocoa Powder (Green & Blacks is good as well as Natasha's Living Food)
 2-3 Tablespoons Honey (or maple syrup or agave if you're not on SCD!)
1 small pinch salt

I made this amount 3 or 4 times to make 1 large egg, 2 smaller eggs and 22 teddies!

First, you melt the cocoa butter in a large bowl sitting over a pot of barely simmering water. When fully melted, add the cocoa powder and mix well with a metal whisk. Keep the heat low and add the honey, one tablespoon at a time. Mix well and then taste to see if you need to add more honey. When I got to this stage, I thought I might fall down, the taste was just incredible. It's hard to be objective about it though, as I hadn't had a morsel of chocolate for over a year!! When you are happy with the sweetness you can add flavour if you wish, I added a few drops of vanilla. Then take the bowl off the heat and let it cool a bit, stirring every now and again. It's now ready for pouring into moulds or driving yourself crazy swirling it into eggs! Leave to set for about half an hour in the freezer and store in the fridge. Honestly, even if you're not on SCD, this is SO worth doing, for a special treat. I have never tasted chocolate like it, it seemed to intensify as it was melting in the mouth - DIVINE!! And thankfully for everyone, there were no side-effects!!