A cracking good egg
A recipe for a luxurious chocolate cake
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The most expensive Easter egg ever was scooped up at a yard sale in the American Midwest. An ornamental egg by Fabergé and known as the Third Imperial, it had a value of around £20million/$25.5 million.
Your Easter egg scooped up in a local store is more likely to weigh in between 60p/83cents for a Cadbury Creme Egg (annual sales of 500 million) and an average £7/$9.65 for a boxed one.
Fabergé’s was encrusted with diamonds and sapphires and filled with a 14-carat gold timepiece by Vacheron Constantin. If you're lucky, yours might contain wrapped chocolates.
180 million boxed Easter eggs are sold each year, 80 million of those in the UK with British children being blessed with 8 of them each - around 8000 calories eaten over an average of 4 days. In the US, chocolate bunnies are more popular, with 91 million sold last year.
When you reach for whichever foiled treat catches your eye, are you swayed by its gaudy packaging, or do you give it the consideration you might afford to the origins of the regular produce in your shopping basket?
The vast majority of the 3 million tons of cocoa produced for the annual creation of chocolate comes from small farms in West Africa. The farmers’ families live on less than $1 a day. Because these cocoa farmers are so underpaid, they hire children to labour in hazardous conditions to grow it - 1.56 million of them in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.
Chocolate production doesn’t only exploit child labour, it also causes deforestation. 90% of the natural forests in the Ivory Coast and Ghana has been lost to cocoa cultivation, to produce 70% of the world’s supply.
Some major chocolate makers have engaged in Fair Trade. Some have not. A report by Mighty Earth, Green America and Be Slavery Freesurveyeing 13 major chocolate companies and eight cocoa suppliers found high-end Godiva, luxury Belgian chocolatier, prominent in a report by Mighty Earth, Green America and Be Slavery Free “for failing to take responsibility for the conditions with which its chocolates are made, despite making huge profits ...[and for making] very little progress on social and environmental issues in the last few years."
But even those praised as responsible can’t be depended upon, despite their best efforts.
Tony's Chocolonely prides itself on producing 100% slave-free chocolate. It has topped the group's Slave Free Chocolate’s list for its "industry-leading" commitments and progress on sustainability, traceability and labour rights issues in their cocoa supply chains.
Yet it was removed recently for its associations with Big Cocoa company Barry Callebaut which, according to Ayn Riggs, Slave Free Chocolate’s founder, “ties them to child slavery”. This despite Tony’s Chocolonely “doing a great job spreading awareness to the general public.”
Callebaut, along with Olam and Cargill, dominates global cocoa production. (And you thought Cargill only cultivated the Mid-West corn that supplies so much of the High Fructose Corn Syrup considered a contributor to increasing obesity.)
Along with Nestlé, Mars, Mondelēz and Hershey, Callebaut, Olam and Cargill are currently the subject of a US lawsuit being brought by International Human Rights Advocates representing eight former child slaves forced to work unpaid on cocoa plantations.
Chocolate makers with Fairtrade certification (there are several different marks) include Guittard, Montezuma’s, Seed & Bean, Divine, Alter Ego. Check Slave Free Chocolate for a longer list. The growing ‘boutique’ chocolate-bar market prides itself on ethical production. Check its labels or websites.
Chocolate Easter eggs are a relatively new confection. They originated in France and Germany in the early 19th century. The first in the UK were produced by J.S. Fry & Sons in 1873, followed by Cadbury’s Easter Eggs two years later.
Across the Continent wooden eggs are ornamented, with the hand-painted Russian lacquered icon eggs from Palekh among the most valued.
Decorating eggs has been an Easter tradition for centuries. Edward I's household accounts for 1307 record: "18 pence for 450 eggs to be boiled and dyed or covered with gold leaf and distributed to the Royal household". Congregants of the Christian Orthodox church boil eggs in onion skins to turn the shells red as a representation of Christ’s blood. Hens’ eggs were apparently adopted as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ, the hard shell representing the tomb and the chick that hatched the resurrection.
Well before Christianity, pagans - and followers of Wicca today - celebrated new life at the spring equinox, honouring Ostara, fertility goddess with a name sounding remarkably like Easter. Ostara’s sacred animal was the rabbit. Apparently she vested her Easter bunny with the power to lay coloured eggs.
If you’re now thoroughly confused about which Easter eggs to buy without guilt, make this instead. It’s quite the best chocolate cake I know, intensely rich.
It is made ahead as it needs to rest overnight before being assembled. It lasts in the fridge for at least a week (if you haven’t eaten it all at one sitting), and freezes well. The other thing in its favour is that it uses no flour, so is gluten free.
Serves 10-12
600g/21oz 70% Fairtrade chocolate, chopped
600g/21oz salted butter, cubed
12 large eggs, separated
600g/21oz caster/fine sugar
For the icing/frosting:
300g/10.5oz salted butter, softened
450g/15oz icing/confectioners’ sugar
500g/17oz mascarpone, room temperature
Handful of strawberries,raspberries, blueberries or small (ethical) Easter eggs to decorate. Or nothing.
Preheat oven to 140C/280F.
Remove any shelves above the middle shelf from the oven as the cakes will rise high. Butter 2x24cm/9.5 inches springform cake tins then line with greaseproof paper.
Break the chocolate into small pieces and put into a bowl with the butter over simmering water, its base not touching it, and melt both, stirring occasionally.
Beat egg whites on low speed until they begin to froth then, increasing the speed, add half the sugar, a spoonful at a time, till glossy and forming stiff peaks.
In a separate bowl, beat together the yolks and remaining sugar till pale and creamy, then fold in the egg whites then the melted chocolate. Divide between the tins and bake 1 hour till firm. Leave the cakes in the tins to cool and refrigerate overnight. They will slump.
To make the icing, beat the butter until pale and fluffy. Sift in half the icing sugar and beat till smooth. Beat in the mascarpone. Don’t overbeat or the icing will curdle.
Release the cakes from their tins. Spread one with just under half the icing, sandwich together and spread the top and sides with the remaining mixture and decorate if you want.
What I enjoy about Julia Watson's writing on food are not just the recipes which are remarkably easy to do and don't seem to demand the endless exotic ingredients of so many posh Sundays' cookery pages but the fascinating fact packed mini essay on the history or the economics or geography of the particular food she has chosen to write on. This is higher journalism - well researched, factual, and sets the actual recipe in richer, wide context.