Chocolate covered marshmallow eggs

What fun Spring and Easter are! My parents used to make these delicious treats for us for Easter. My Mom would make the chocolate covered eggs, and then my Dad would write our names on them. My Dad has the most beautiful handwriting ever. I'm so not kidding! He used to teach calligraphy! It has been a good 20 years since they have made them and I thought this was such a neat thing to start making again. I have already played with making my own marshmallows and have been loving it. For these chocolate covered marshmallow eggs I added some cherry extract to the mixture. All of my family that snitched from the "extra" marshmallow parts, really liked it with the cherry flavor. I think I will make it with a different flavor each time. The next flavor that I want to try out is orange. Back to the treats!

First you are going to need to make some marshmallow.


Next you are going to take a cake pan and fill it with tons of flour. Then, you take an egg and make egg impressions in the flour. This creates an indent of about half an egg.
Here is another pan with another set of the egg imprints. This batch can make quite a few and you want to have plenty of egg molds ready to go, as the marshmallow mixture sets pretty quicklyYou have to be careful not to put the egg imprints too close to each other or else the imprints you already have can crack and fill in with flour from the sides.

Here I have spooned the marshmallow mixture into each indent.

Take your marshmallows from their flour molds and cut off the back sides, to leave a flat side. I actually used scissors to cut it right off, and had no problem with it!

Here is a set of my marshmallow eggs. You need to dust the flour off of these eggs to make sure the chocolate will stick to them.

I melt semi sweet chocolate chips in a cup. I had about 2 cups of chocolate chips and then I added 1 tablespoon of shortening, to thin out the chocolate and help give the chocolate that nice shine. I melt the chips for 30 seconds at a time in the microwave until it is a pretty thin mixture (no more than 1 minute 30 seconds). Coat the backs of the eggs with chocolate and then put them on a cooling rack with tin foil underneath to catch the chocolate drips.
Here a marshmallow is on the cooling rack, waiting for it's top coat!
Just spoon the chocolate over the eggs. The mixture just slides over the entire egg and the excess runs off.

See how nicely it coats and leaves a smooth coating?

Beautiful!
Once I got these all coated I actually picked up the rack and tapped it gently on the counter, to get even more of the chocolate off.







Make sure to move these off of the cooling rack and onto another foil line pan. Put these in the fridge to harden.

At this point, my Dad just piped frosting straight onto the chocolate covered marshmallows. However, as much as my Dad worked with me, I could not master calligraphy. In fact, I even had really bad regular handwriting. I remember my Dad working with me over the summer, on my handwriting. To no avail, I still have bad handwriting.

So, my cheat here is to print up the words Happy, Easter, and Spring in a few different pretty fonts. Then, I cover them with wax paper, making sure to tape down the wax paper because it will slide around as you are trying to write out the words. You could also print up flowers or squirrel embellishments, or any other decorations you might want to add. I think the ones I will do for my kids for Easter this year will have chicks and bunnies on them. Cute, right?

I write the words with chocolate. I just threw a couple of those chips of colored chocolate into small ziplock baggies. I only needed to melt these for about 10-20 seconds for each bag (done separately). The chips melt wonderfully this way. You snip off a very small tip of the corner of the bag. Then, I used this bag to trace the wax covered words with. I didn't have light blue chocolate so I took the white ones and added blue food coloring. Make sure to use the paste, and not the liquid food coloring. Chocolate goes funny if any liquid gets in it. Then, I refrigerated the words to harden them up. This only takes about 10 minutes. Take the chocolate words out of the fridge and carefully peel them off and place them onto your hardened chocolate covered eggs.
Your words wont conform to your chocolate. Some of them do if you just leave the words on the egg out to get to room temperature. I don't like to wait and so I grabbed my embossing gun and held it far away and lightly touched the heated air to the word. This worked like magic, forming the words onto the chocolate eggs!

I did try a few decorations straight onto the eggs. This does save a few steps, but is really tricky for those of us that shake (as I do).





Some fonts work better than others. I love the E from this one, however the font itself is too close together and so the chocolate runs into each other as it has a thicker line.
See how much better this one looks?

Here a batch of the eggs are on a bed of homemade edible easter grass. To make the grass I took the greens out of rainbow colored twizzlers. I sliced the whole length of the twizzler, in between each line on the twizzler, to cut strips out of the twizzlers.I don't like the fake grass touching the edible chocolate covered easter eggs because it tends to stick to it. This, I feel is the perfect solution to that problem, and pretty cute to boot!
Notice the polka dotted egg? Another one that I decorated straight onto it. I also made a few others with stripes, zigzags, whole sections colored in, etc. The possibilities are endless!

Happy Easter!

Rebecca
RootsAndWingsCo.blogspot.com