Tag: Easter

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How to Make Decadent Easter Eggs with 3 Ingredients

Let’s face it: Easter weekend can be a nightmare

  • It makes you feel guilty for feeding your kids on commercial chocolate eggs, made with plenty of refined sugars, chemicals, and additives.
  • It makes you feel even guiltier for enjoying a little bit of extra chocolate, making you feel like you have just spoilt your diet — kids play and run all day, after all, so all that chocolate might not have a huge impact on them, but you…
  • You would love to get your kids involved in some fun kitchen activities to enhance their creativity and spend some time together over the Easter break, instead of having them play video games all day, while you are busy in the kitchen prepping your lamb marinade and baking cakes.

I’ve got the perfect recipe!

I love homemaking whatever food can be homemade. And I also love avoiding processed foods, food colourings, and anything that can be avoided, to optimise my digestion, while still enjoying the foods I love.

But I also love Easter eggs. I love all dark-chocolatey things, and I also love to make my own raw chocolate. This year I decided to try something I had been wanting to try for a while: I made my own mint-flavoured Easter egg.

I went for mint flavour, because both me and my husband are very much into mint chocolate. If you prefer, feel free to replace it with vanilla seeds, cinnamon powder, raisins, or hazelnut bits — basically anything you like your chocolate with (even milk powder, if you don’t fancy dark chocolate).

INGREDIENTS

ICING (optional)

PROCEDURE

  1. Prepare a Bain Marie to melt the cacao butter.
  2. Once fully melted, add in honey and stir thoroughly.
  3. Gently, add in cacao powder, salt, and mint oil, until smooth and creamy.
  4. Pour the mixture in a polycarbonate mould and, using a spatula, make sure it is evenly distributed. This will be your first chocolate coat.
  5. While keeping the leftover chocolate mixture in the Bain Marie, let the mould sit in the fridge for 10 minutes.
  6. Take the mould out, give a second coat, and put back in the fridge.
  7. If you wish, give a third coat, to make the shell stronger.
  8. Cover in cling film, and store in the fridge or freezer.
  9. Once the appearance of each half begins to look a ‘blurry’ through the glass, the egg is ready (it might take up to a couple of days). Gently flip the mould upside down, to allow each half to naturally come off.
  10. To seal the egg, in a pot or sauce pan, warm up some water to 50°C. Grab one of the halves, and let its edges touch the water for a few seconds. Quickly press it against the other half until the attach together (3-5 seconds). The egg is now ready to be decorated

MAKE THE ICING

  1. Just as you did for the egg, melt the cacao butter in a Bain Marie, and combine with honey, mint oil, and coconut flour.
  2. Sprinkle with turmeric and spirulina powders to make the chocolate green (feel free to switch to beetroot powder to make it pink; chilli or paprika for red; blue spirulina for blue; turmeric alone for yellow).
  3. Pour the mixture in a sac à poche, and let it sit in the fridge for a few minutes, until it gets lukewarm: if the mixture is still too hot, it will melt the egg (trust me, I’ve learnt the hard way!); if it gets too hard, you won’t be able to squeeze it anymore.
  4. Decorate the egg as you please, and let it sit in the fridge (or freezer, if you prefer), until ready.

As I made my own egg a little bit too thin, I was left with lots of extra mixture, which I used to make mint-chocolate pralines. Some of them, I filled up with crunchy hazelnut butter. I stored all the pralines in the freezer, to enhance their fresh mint taste, and they turned out just perfect.

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My Mindful, Ethical, Easter

Thousands of lambs are slaughtered every year around Easter time, just because it’s a tradition to consume lamb on Easter Day. I’m not gonna lie, lamb is my favourite meat, taste-wise. However, I’ve always opposed this silly tradition, as this unfair massacre is just senseless. After all, I can still enjoy lamb any other day.

On the other hand, however, I’m well aware of the fact that nobody will stop slaughtering lambs for Easter just because I refuse to buy them, and the unsold meat (mostly organs) will be wasted, without reducing the numbers of lambs to be slaughtered the next year. How can this dilemma be solved in the most ethical way?

Our Ethical Choice

We decided not to order any meat from our local farmers market this Easter, but to go and see what was available, namely, to buy what no one else wanted to buy and would most likely end up in the trash. Most meat was obviously lamb, and that’s what we also bought. However, rather than buying legs, shoulders, chops or popular cuts in general, we went for hearts and necks, which are: cheap, delicious, nutritious and less popular (therefore more likely to be wasted).

Our Easter Table

As you might or might not know, I have Argentinian roots on my maternal side, and for my family, Easter is a serious tradition. In particular, something that can never miss from our Easter table are empanadas. Since I quit gluten, however, I also stopped making empanadas for many years. But this year I wanted to try something new, and decided to make tuna empanadas again, using only buckwheat, goat butter, salt, water and 1 duck egg for my dough. Although the overall consistency came out quite different from the empanadas my grandma used to make when I was a kid, the taste was awesome and both me and my husband really enjoyed them.

Alongside empanadas, we had a huge salad, halloumi, cheddar, mushrooms, lamb necks and hearts, all cooked on a raclette grill. It took me less than 5 minutes to prepare everything, and it turned out to be one of the tastiest and most enjoyable Easter lunches ever.

Lamb hearts, halloumi and mushrooms cooked on stone on top of our raclette grill (underneath, some cheddar is being melted meanwhile)

As a dessert, I just combined some eggs with raw cacao powder, protein powder, liquid stevia, bicarbonate of soda, Himalayan salt and vanilla extract, and made some muffins out of it. It could never be Easter without some chocolatey dessert. 😉

My gluten free, sugar free, high protein chocolate muffins. A perfect finisher for a mindful Easter lunch. 🙂