Making the Seasons: March

Hello! Welcome to my Making the Seasons post for March. In this annual project, my friend Lucy of Attic24 and I are consciously trying to find time in our busy lives to focus on achievable and seasonal creative projects. The idea is to find small but fulfilling projects which are in tune with the months of the year and rewarding to create, and I really hope it might inspire you to have a go at making something yourself. 

This month my thoughts turned to Easter which, after Christmas, is one of my favourite times of the year to get creative. All those feathers, eggs and flowers, all those bright, clean colours - it really lifts my spirits at a time of year when I'm ready to wave goodbye to winter. 

I have two quick and easy Easter themed projects this month which you could easily recreate yourself if you fancied doing something crafty or a bit of light cooking, and when I say cooking I really just mean melting, because I made Easter chocolate bark.

Chocolate bark, as far as I can tell, is simply a slab of chocolate absolutely covered with a topping of your choice; nuts, dried fruit, sweets, honeycomb, more chocolate....you can be as silly or sophisticated as you like. (Look up Unicorn Bark and you'll see what I mean.) Since all it involves is melting, pouring and decorating chocolate, it's a really fun activity to do with children as they can be as messy creative as they want and, if they're older, do it all themselves depending on the level of independence you feel comfortable giving them.

I began with some mini egg bark, melting 400g white and 200g dark chocolate. I poured the white chocolate onto a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper and smoothed it around. Then I drizzled the dark chocolate back and forth in lines, then used a skewer to create a messy feather effect. It was easy and so satisfying! Then we sprinkled some mini eggs over the top, plus a bag of "micro eggs" (mini mini eggs) that I found in Asda, and put it in the fridge to set. 

Even Bella was impressed when she saw it, and she doesn't impress easily, let me tell you. I suppose you could cut it into neat shapes if you wanted too, but I like it broken into shards.

We also made a milk and dark chocolate version covered in broken Cadbury's creme eggs. Splitting the eggs with a knife was gloriously sticky and fun.

Despite complaining frequently and loudly to anyone who'll listen that creme eggs don't taste the same as they did when I was a child, and that they've shrunk too, I still have a weakness for them. Give me a hot cup of tea and a creme egg in the evening with some crochet and some kind of gentle crime drama (Midsomer Murders/Morse/Lewis etc) on the tv and I'm really very happy.

(I am always telling John that chocolate bars have shrunk since I was little. I remember Wagon Wheels the size of saucers and Curly Wurlies the size of a 30cm ruler. It's quite possible that I have simply grown.)

But Easter themed chocolate bark - easy, fun, and a nice alternative gift to a chocolate egg. Or you could have both.

Continuing with the egg theme, I wanted to make some decorations to create a kind of Easter tree. I'd originally seen the idea for the hanging eggs on Pinterest and but didn't think it would look that great with the usual brown, date-stamped free range eggs I buy in the supermarket. But then my mum and dad, who'd just returned from a holiday in Suffolk , gave me a couple of boxes of the most beautifully coloured eggs laid by the chickens on the farm where they'd been staying. 

Those perfectly smooth white and pale blue shells suddenly seemed perfect for my little hanging chocolate holders, and so I very carefully cracked them, cooked with the (delicious, of course) eggs and then rinsed out the shells and carefully left them to dry.

Then it was just a case of threading a loop through a tiny pin-prick sized hole at the top of the egg, laying a bed of toy stuffing or cotton wool, and adding a handful of mini eggs.

The sprigs of cherry blossom I'd gathered from the garden weren't quite robust enough to take the weight of the chocolate-filled shells, so I added some willow stalks and hung the eggs from those instead.

These few branches and twigs make a kind of Easter tree, and I expect to have to refill the eggs many times between now and Easter day.

Please pop over to Lucy's blog to have a look at her Making the Seasons post - I imagine it will be full of her usual, beautiful colour and sparkle. I hope you all have a happy and relaxing Easter weekend. Here, John is off three out of the four days which is nice. We've got various things planned; breakfast out, lots of long walks, a big family meal at my parent's on Easter Sunday, plus chores like chopping wood (it's endless!) and jobs around the house. It must be spring by now because I have an urge to clear out every single cupboard. And eat all the chocolate of course.