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Easter egg leftover madness

It’s always time for chocolate, isn’t it?

So why is it that, after Easter, the chocolate egg mountain doesn’t shrink, but moves mysteriously from place to place, morphing and melting over time – and doesn’t actually get eaten? When The Husband complimented me on my ‘display’ of chocolate – I felt I had to do something. I remembered reading a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe in the Guardian a few years back. Essentially, you made a cake, coated it in chocolate, and stuck broken up chocolates and eggs into the coating. Nice, but not what I wanted.

The depleted egg shrine - post leftover madness onslaught

I remembered a cookie recipe supplied by my nieces – which gives some of the chewiest, most delicious American-style biscuits I’ve ever eaten. However, I wanted to do more than simply replace chocolate chips with broken bunnies, chicks and chopped up strawberry creams. Something tailormade to using up Easter eggs.

A quick trawl on the Internet and I came across a site called Cooking with Karma. Being a lazy skate I chose to skip the option of becoming a subscriber. I watched her YouTube video and decided that although I didn’t have quantities I could easily crack the code of her Ultra Chocolate Slice – as well all my leftover eggs.

I was wrong and right. I mashed two packs of chocolate digestives (plain and milk to be even-handed) in a bag with a rolling pin. Both the bag and I got worn out so I changed to the blender. Half a pack of melted butter into the crumbs looked about right. And I pressed the huge quantity of crumbs into my largest pyrex dish. While the base chilled in the fridge, I began to systematically smash up Easter eggs and melt them over a pan of steaming water. There’s something a little spooky about breaking up Easter eggs – they are almost skull-like. I didn’t let it stop me.

I love the look of melted chocolate, shiny and lush like a brand new pair of patent leather shoes. However, as any novice cook will tell you, if you  add cream to hot melted chocolate it turns into something you might want to plant vegetable seeds in. I realised how clever Karma had been to keep her methods a secret from me. Sticking the bowl back over the steamy pan and tipping the rest of the pot of cream in plus half a pot of condensed milk seemed to do the trick.

It was only as I was opening the bag of marshmallows that I realised the overall fatal flaw in my plan: I had now made three trips to the supermarket and spent a small fortune on subsidiary ingredients for my ‘leftovers’ recipe. This was more Yotam Ottolenghi than Delia’s budget gourmet. But I was committed. I smeared some of the melted chocolate delight over the crumby base – it all sort of got mixed in together but I gave it a good press down with the base of a saucepan!

On went the halved mini eggs and marshmallows. On went the rest of the melted choccy goo. In it all went to the fridge. It looked pretty good when I took it out…just an extra drizzle of condensed milk to decorate and sweeten it up a bit and hey presto…

The Easter 'leftovers' fridge cake - more ingredients than a Harry Potter spell