Just in time for Easter, we’ve been looking at fun activities that involve the kids during the holidays. Perfect around Easter time and absolutely delicious why not give this chocolate egg cheesecake recipe a try!
I’ve seen a couple of variations of these on the web, but wanted to make a couple of alterations to make them really easy. Firstly, I couldn’t be bothered to make the egg-shells….ooooh no, far too much faff – so I started a quest (well, a couple of hour shopping trip anyway) to find the perfect shop-bought hollow egg. Cadburys and most supermarkets do bags of hollow eggs aimed for egg hunts, which seemed perfect in theory, but on closer inspection (yum yum) they are just a bit small for the job, and the Cadbury shells are too thick (albeit undeniably tasty). Plus they’re only available at Easter…which is a little too limiting for my taste!
Then I had the bright idea of Kinder eggs, so I bought a couple of ‘test eggs’ (if only this sort of research was a real job!). A quick egg-check revealed the obvious problem (d’oh!) – Kinder eggs have the plastic toy egg thingy inside them…and how do you get this out without smashing the outer chocolate egg?! There’s absolutely no way you could do it by cutting off the thinner end of the egg, so to start with you have to go for the fat end. The first test egg sadly didn’t make it – it was really cold, and as I tried to cut the end off, it fell apart. Oh well, it didn’t go to waste! For the second test egg, I was a girl prepared…slightly warmer conditions (i.e. not straight out of the fridge), and a sharp knife (serrated seemed to work well). If you’re careful, especially when getting the plasticky egg thing out the middle), it can be done – and hey presto, a perfect hollow egg for filling! This is when it gets much more relaxing, as you can protect your hollow little lovelies in an egg box, and after the attacking-them-with-a-knife stage they are a lot less vulnerable (figures). Also you have a whole load of chocolate egg tops left to, erm, clean up.
After putting the hollow eggs in the fridge, you can get onto the cheesecake bit. Really any no-bake simple cream cheese based cheesecake recipe would work fine here, I used the following:
Mix together the cream cheese, icing sugar, lemon juice and vanilla, and give it a very good beat (or bung it in the food processor to avoid any actual manual effort). Whip the double cream in a separate bowl until stiff, then stir in. That’s it – told you it was easy. The hardest thing by far is not eating half the mixture as you go. This quantity would fill at least 12 eggs I think (I doubled it to be on the safe side, and had loads and loads leftover, so unless you want an additional family sized cheesecake, don’t do that!).
Then use a little spoon to carefully fill the hollow eggs. It seems that it looks best if you leave a little gap around the top. Put them back in the fridge. Leave them there for at least 30 mins, then take them out and scoop a little of the cheesecake mix back out to create a hollow for the ‘yolk’. I used the fat end of a chopstick for this, and had to summon up massive self-restraint not to eat the removed cheesecake (ok, ok, so I ate a bit!). Finally, fill in the hollow with some orange curd (if you can get it, if not I tried lemon and as long as you pick one that’s quite a deep colour it’ll look absolutely fine). If you’re careful and your curd is quite runny, you’ll be able to do this with a teaspoon. I was in a bit of hurry, and not feeling massively careful, so just piped it in which literally took seconds.
So there you have it – super fun and impressive looking chocolate egg cheesecakes that you know took hardly any time – perfect :). And from a presentation perspective, the fab thing is that you could use any kind of egg cup or egg storage device to serve them in. I used an egg-box for an unfussy look, and put them out with cute wooden spoons, decorated with little buttons superglued to the top. If you can resist them that long, they’ll keep in the fridge for a couple of days.