Easter eggs, the long good friday

I have often wanted to make my Mrs. an egg for Easter, but usually opt for a last minute Lindor or Wispa egg on my way home from work on Easter Saturday, as I am now in a job that shuts down for bank holidays and left with a 4 day weekend I had finally run out of excuses to put my money where my mouth is.

One teeny problem, having always been well staffed in the pastry department, I have not had the neccesity to temper my own chocolate i realised for over 15 years, sure I have come up with desserts, but with the constraints of everyday work have often asked of my pastry section to do the nitty gritty of the mis-en-place before I step in at the 11th hour and take the credit for the creation, slightly different here, G is a great teacher and a chef who always pushes himself to the limit regardless of business levels, so I have taken to producing my creations and re-learning the pastry section piece by piece.

So Thursday, I jump on with G to make a god awful mess (I mean make eggs for our members with him), during this time (a whole 3 hours, where G tempered all the chocolate for me, so didn't practise any myself), I picked his brains on tempering, decorating and making the eggs themselves.

Armed with this new(ish) knowledge, and about 3kg of chocolate and some moulds in my bag I set off home with the express mission to make my darling Mrs. an egg within an egg within an egg. oh did I tell you how much experience I had? Not!

Firstly I did not think of one small issue, that would be my one small kitchen, if I thought I had made a mess at work with my ample stainless steel surfacing, my wooden worktops (tiny), and the ins and outs of family life over the Easter holidays certainly didnt mean that I was lessening the mess, quite frankly the opposite, and we will be cleaning that up for some time, a lot of it on the Good Friday hence the title

All that said, quite soon I had all my varying size moulds full of appropriate size chocolate shells, awaiting extraction (the tricky bit), and after trashing the first go of the larger shells had enough chocolate still to keep going.

I am happy not to have had to dash out to a 7-11 at the last minute, and managed to produce exactly what I had aimed for, but I have learned a valuable lesson that my Father always told me, and that was to never ask someone to do a job that I am not capable of doing myself, and from now on I think I will set out to teach myself some of the basics that we chefs can neglect from time to time, especially when we run larger brigades It is fine to utilize someone elses expertize, but not when you have no idea yourself, learn it then delegate, my new kitchen ethos.

note the safety tea-towel holding the egg off its stand at the front, probably the most nerve racking moment was removing this just seconds before presenting the egg

and as you can just see, the middle egg inside. took Mrs. W. 2 days before she would crack this layer

Scones, never made this many before

A short while ago my wife talked to me about a quandry she faces for a local PTA event fundraiser for our childrens school, she had agreed to produce one thing for this event, my reply was " you only agreed to do ONE thing, wow you held yourself back this time why only one?"

"err because it is 500 scones!"

"how many?"

and so it goes on, anyway there is no way we could possibly conceive preparing and cooking 500 scones in our small home kitchen so the only solution was for me to do them at work. so with the fun day this Sunday, I thought I would get cracking on the mix first, lets get the ingredients together.

18 kg flour

2.4kg sugar

600gm baking powder

120 (1.5kg) eggs

2.5 kg sultanas (only used in half the batch)

4.8kg butter

80g salt

2.2 litres of milk

split into 4 batches

which gives you.......

note the phone in the foreground to give an idea of scale

after a little resting (me and the dough)

roll, cut, brush with egg wash, allow to dry and brush again, its amazing I noted when re-rolling after first cut, exactly how aggressive the gluten develops on every successive roll after the first, anyway digressing from the point

then cook like so......

with so many in the oven the reciped time of 15 mins at 170C is thrown out of the window, they took between 21 and 28 minutes due to the air struggling to circulate around the oven.

once done.....

in total 2 oven loads were required to achive the number my wife needed, and after cooling I was left with 554 scones, there was a noticable difference between 1st roll and the subsequent rolls to use up all the mix, if you can afford to when making the mix then only use the first roll, and use the remaining dough on fruit cobblers and the like.

anyway, back to work got a wedding to prepare now.