XPets Adventure

This month’s adventure on Sunday coming, involves chocolate and a thieving bunny wabbit!

We read up on the history of Easter eggs, what they mean and where they started and how they’re made! The answers to the Quiz will be in the article as usual, so don’t go skipping through and missing any.

We then have to find all the missing Easter Bunnies and find out which picture the Egg Napper is hiding in. And finally make up a funny caption for our Caption Competition.

So here’s the Intel all about Easter eggs!

Why Do We Have Easter Eggs And How Are They Made?
Early Christians in Mesopotamia dyed eggs in the period after Easter. The practice was adopted by the Orthodox Churches, and from there it spread into Western Europe. Eggs represent new life and rebirth, and it’s thought that this ancient custom was absorbed into Easter celebrations.
During Lent, when Christians fasted to mark Jesus’ time in the wilderness, eggs were one of the foods that people weren’t allowed to eat (incidentally, this is why we make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday). So when Easter Sunday came around, tucking into an egg was a real treat.

John Cadbury made his first ‘French eating Chocolate’ in 1842 but it was not until 1875 that the first Cadbury Easter Eggs were made. This may have been because he was not sufficiently impressed with continental eggs to wish to compete with them. In fact, progress in the chocolate Easter egg market was very slow until a method was found of making the chocolate flow into the moulds.

The modern chocolate Easter egg with its smoothness, shape and flavour owes its progression to the two greatest developments in the history of chocolate – the invention of a press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean by the Dutch inventor Van Houten in 1828 and the introduction of a pure cocoa by Cadbury Brothers in 1866. The Cadbury process made large quantities of cocoa butter available and this was the secret of making moulded chocolate or indeed, any fine eating chocolate.

The earliest Cadbury chocolate eggs were made of ‘dark’ chocolate with a plain smooth surface and were filled with dragees. The earliest ‘decorated eggs’ were plain shells enhanced by chocolate piping and marzipan flowers.
Decorative skill and variety soon followed and by 1893 there were no less than 19 different lines on the Cadbury Brothers Easter list in the UK. Richard Cadbury’s artistic skill undoubtedly played an important part in the development of the Easter range. Many of his designs were based on French, Dutch and German originals adapted to Victorian tastes. From Germany came the ‘crocodile’ finish which by breaking up the smooth surface, disguised minor imperfections; still used today by some manufacturers, this was the forerunner to the many distinctive finishes now available.

The launch in 1905 of the famous Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate made a tremendous contribution to the Easter egg market. The popularity of this new kind of chocolate vastly increased sales of Easter eggs and did much to establish them as seasonal best sellers. Today the Easter egg market is predominantly milk chocolate.

So how are Easter eggs made? Let’s find out.

Well those commercial Easter eggs in the shops are made exactly the same as we can make them at home, except on a much larger scale and involving lots of machine, but the basics are simple. Chocolate is melted and then poured into molds as the molds turn, thus spreading the chocolate in a thin layer all around the mold. The molds are in two halves and when the chocolate is set the 2 halves are put together and then wrapped in foil. The production may have changed with technology but the basic idea remains the same. Are you going to make some this year?

Good luck pals!

Location

Bournville, Birmingham B30, UK