The beautiful world of Easter chocolates 2017 - part 1

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Easter is just around the corner, which for pastry chefs, means lots of work, creativity and a great challenge to prepare beautiful Easter collections. We have checked out what some of the best pastry chefs have been preparing for Easter.

Heather Kaniuk, the executive pastry chef of Shangri-La has, together with her team, created a special Easter collection. The star of the Easter show at the Shangri-La is a giant chocolate egg made with their signature Cacao Barry Or Noir Dark Chocolate. The egg was created using the elegantly shaped Cacao Barry mould. In addition, the team prepared a chocolate Easter bunny that will be on display at the Shangri-La, as well as a variety of eggs that will be on sale in Lang, the artisan deli. All the eggs have been made using their signature Or Noir chocolate and different milk chocolate blends.


The collection was inspired by geometric and abstract designs. The giant Easter egg features a variety of vibrant chocolate discs that add a pop of colour and are reminiscent of Spring.  It is always nice to welcome Spring after a long winter, so the bright colours and bold shapes are an ode to the new season.

 

Hideko Kawa from the Sweet Art Lab sees Easter as a lovely fun moment for children with the Egg hunt as an absolute highlight so she decided to create something playful and cute for them.  Alongside the more basic ‘find as many eggs as you can’ approach she enjoyed creating a nest with a combination of chicks, an Easter Bunny as well as some sumptuous dark chocolate eggs.  She is hoping that children will gobble the animals leaving the dark chocolate eggs for the adults. She is also organising some egg making classes for parents so that they can do the same with their children. A tastier alternative to egg painting.

And what inspired the flavours of Hideko’s collection this year? “This year I wanted to focus on fusing the ingredients and ideas of my country of birth - Japan - and the country I also call my home now, the United Kingdom. I created a British gourmet collection specifically aimed for export to Japan. A part of it is a mix of chocolate and citrus preserve. Triple citrus and triple chocolate made of dark, milk and white chocolate as well as pink grapefruit, orange and lime.  It is really delicious and very decadent!! For the Japanese gourmet collection instead I am combining the exquisite taste of Yuzu oranges, native to Japan, alongside Sake chocolates and preserves.”

Marc Demarquette of Demarquette Fine Chocolates created an exquisite Easter collection, ‘Oceana’, which  is inspired by the cradle of Life – the Oceans. He created a range of Ostrich sized eggs decorated with figures depicting life at sea. The Salted Caramels have been renamed “Surf & Turf” to reflect not only the fun elements of our culinary habits but the link between land and sea. There are three large 500g eggs made with House 35% Milk Chocolate, each with fun names depicting an oceanic theme. Each egg is hand painted in a variety of blues reflecting the changes in oceanic colours. Each mould is filled with tempered 35% house milk chocolate, and only when the chocolate is about to set the egg is ready to be closed and rotated by hand to ensure an equal coverage of chocolate is set all around the egg. This process can take up to 25 minutes for each creation. When the eggs are set, they are then decorated by hand with the depicting chocolate theme. Each egg will take a further 25 minutes to complete. To suit the dark chocolate fans, Marc also created a fun light pink iridescence ‘Glam Clam’ filled with 6 mini Surf & Turf Eggs. The clam is first covered with a light coat of iridescent powder to ensure a hint of shine before being sprayed with a very thin layer of white cocoa butter. The clam is then filled with mini dark chocolate eggs. Every product made by the Demarquette team is as ever individually hand-made with meticulous attention to detail and will vary and differ from each other.