Chocolates for Easter

So I'm a little behind. Again. Who's surprised? I'm not surprised. Anyway, we made chocolates for Easter. Not starting from grinding the beans kind of felt like cheating and makes it hard to me to feel entirely comfortable saying we "made" them, but it was fun. We had some organic baking chocolate we'd got on clearance and it was... well, it had probably seen better days. Kaia unwrapped all the chocolate bars.

We added sugar and melted it all in a pot, Kaia kept it stirred.
 

 Once up to temp, it took a really long time to cool. Kaia started getting very tired, so while we waited for it to be cool enough to pour in the molds, we started playing with the ingredients we had out to add to the chocolates. We dipped almonds in the melted chocolate and then into coconut. They were yummy!

 We have a mold that was my grandmother's - roosters, eggs, and rabbits. It was neat to be making chocolates in the same mold she used. As we filled the molds, Kaia added almonds and coconuts to them.

We picked up a second mold at a thrift store with a variety of neat shapes.

We made chocolate suckers, too. I put either a cereal puff, a gummy bunny, or a jelly bean in each one before pouring the chocolate in. They ended up being mostly enveloped by the chocolate, so in the future I think I will stick them on afterward with a bit of melted chocolate. Not that this bothered the kids. :)

We put the almonds and chocolates in mini muffin papers and packed them in little boxes to give to family and friends.

I cut squares of plastic wrap to wrap up the suckers and tied them with twisty tie bows.

They were all well received and came out delicious, we will definitely be making more!