Chocolate Egg Shells

Our Monday night Easter treat tonight.

I am sure these have been done by someone much more adept at using chocolate than me. The beauty of me showing you this cooking project is that you can be assured that if I can do this then you definitely can and probably better. : )

I have mostly heard by word of mouth about these so I will share what I know and what I have done the best I can. These are really fun, require minimal ingredients and are so easy!

For Valentine’s Day I made these to fill with ice cream and strawberries and I documented it somewhat then on my family blog, so I will use those visuals.

1. Bust out your double boiler…I don’t have a double boiler so I use a steel bowl and a small sauce pan.

2. Fill the sauce pan halfway with water (don’t let the water level be so high it touches the bowl).

3. Rest the bowl on top. Turn your burner on medium.

4. Add your chocolate chips. I use about 1 cup to make five “shells.”

5. Let it melt… stirring occasionally. While they melt blow up water balloons. Blow up a few more than you will use since they pop easily. {Note: The chocolate shouldn’t burn easily using this melting method so you don’t need to stir it too much.}

6. Once melted, remove the chocolate from the burner and the bowl from the pan. Let it cool enough so that when you insert a water balloon to be coated it doesn’t pop. This took like 15-20 minutes for me…it depends on the chocolate you are using and how warm/cold your house is…just check every 5 minutes or so.

7. Coat the bottoms of the water balloons by swabbing it around the bowl. Stop when there is a semi-thick layer of chocolate covering half of the water balloon.

8. Set the chocolate covered balloon on a piece of wax paper. Let it dry/finish cooling. You will know that they are ready when the chocolate looks matte instead of shiny.

9. Pop the balloon lightly with a pin and let it deflate. Pull the balloon out. With the white chocolate I had more trouble with this but with the regular/dark chocolate I had no problems.

10. Fill with whatever you desire. Ice Cream…whipped cream…fruit…a Peep. Enjoy!

P.S. When I couldn’t get the balloons to come off of the shell completely {with the white chocolate} I broke it into piece. Then I salvaged non-latex coated pieces and made the little bird sit on it as if it broke the whole darn thing when it “hatched.” ;)