What to do with a chocolate egg

Easter is nearly upon us and this weekend I remembered that we still had a chocolate egg left over from _last_ year. This left me with a dilemma of whether to force feed M (or indeed Dave) chocolate or to do something more creative with it.

I was thinking of attempting to make biscuits or cookies, but was thwarted by the oven deciding to blow up.

The oven dying in a dramatic fashion was unrelated to my baking aspirations. There was a local power surge, the oven was on, it went bang and that was the end of our supper. It's been a bad month for appliances, with the washing machine springing a leak early in March. Still, at least this time I have insurance!

Back to the left over chocolate.

After a little thought I decided to try my hand at Rice Krispie (TM) cakes. I don't really bake that often and have never actually tried making these but the idea seemed simple enough. I googled a little to see how others had done it and then made my own, aided and abetted by a small child.

Ingredients

• Approx 125 g of Cadbury's chocolate
• 1.5tablespoons of golden syrup
• Approx 25g non salted butter
• .5 teaspoon vanilla essence
• Approx 4 mugs of rice pops (supermarket own brand)
• Some sprinkles to decorate with

I broke up the chocolate egg and placed it in a Pyrex bowl suspended over hot water to melt.

The butter also went in, along with the syrup and a little vanilla essence. I stirred and prodded the chocolate mix until I had a shiny almost smooth mix.

I helped M into her booster seat where she took charge of the rice pops. Not quite seeing the connection with the chocolate sauce, M began tossing the rice pops around with much glee whilst I decanted the chocolate into a mixing bowl.

Intervening in the rice based fun, I showed M that I wanted to add the rice pops to the chocolate, which she happily did. I added some more rice pops to make up for those lost to the floor while M got in there with a wooden spoon.

Things were mixed together. M discovered that rice pops in syrup/chocolate are very sticky and don't fall off a spoon easily. We then went on to find out that they are not that easy to spoon into bun cases. Personally I think it would be easier to spoon the whole lot into a baking tray or shallow dish and cut into pieces later.

Once decanted into bun cases, we decorated with 100's and 1000's type sprinkles. I put some sprinkles in a bowl and let M loose with a spoon. Much fun was had. Some sprinkles went into M. A lot of sprinkles went onto the floor. But between us we did get sprinkles onto the cakes!

M and I add sprinkles to the chocolate crispie cakes

The resulting cakes were very tasty, still slightly soft rather than completely set and easy to eat, rather than the type to break your teeth on.

Very easy to make and child friendly, except for the boring melting of chocolate bit.

Finished cakes

Yummy. I will have to make them again.