Easter: Chocolate and Coconut Nests
Happy Easter! It’s that time of year again where we’ve rapidly jumped from one holiday to the next, all desperately waiting for more sunshine and warmer days. Whether the sun has yet to make an appearance in your life, or it’s out in all its glory, I hope this recipe can help brighten up your day from your inside out.
Song suggestions:
Sit Next To Me - Foster the People
Tadow - Masego & FKJ
Chocolate and Coconut Nests
Quite possibly the easiest Easter sweet treat you can make from scratch. Two ingredients + toppings, it doesn’t get much easier than that!
Ingredients (6 nests):
100g coconut (flakes are pictured but desiccated works too)
200g dark chocolate
Anything you want to top them with. Fruit works well as the coconut can be quite drying, so topping with something that has a high water content balances the nests out perfectly!
Recipe:
Melt the chocolate. Either bain-marie it if you’re a pro, or just stick it in the microwave like the rest of us average lot. 30 second stints, stir often making sure it doesn’t burn.
Mix in the coconut flakes until they’re all completely coated in chocolate.
On a plate lined with some baking paper, spoon out a tablespoon of chocolate flakes. Shape into a nest, adding a little dip in the middle with the spoon to help your toppings sit neatly.
Note: refrigerate to solidify, but take them out 30mins before eating or they will be quite hard. Chilled chocolate can be effort to eat and during a holiday that revolves almost entirely around consuming copious amounts of it, the process needs to be as easy as possible.
A Bite Out of Life
enjoy food, enjoy life.
Ana, my final year housemate, was the keenest foodie I’ve ever known. Her tastes spanned from her home country, Spain, to the other side of the world, Korea. Something she used to make really often was kimchi, something I had never heard of before living with her, let alone tried. I found it fascinating that fermenting food could create such rich flavours, just by leaving it in a jar hidden in a cupboard for a couple of days, as did she! It also showed me how enriching learning about the foods of other countries can be.
The process of checking it and adjusting it as you go, reminds me of the sourdough hype that everyone has jumped on during lockdown in the UK. Caring for your food and committing to see something like that through takes some dedication, even if it’s just for a couple of days, but it helps the time tick by faster and keeps you interested in the process of producing your own food.
Anyone that knows me knows that I am awful with spice and so the smell of it was strong enough to deter me from trying it, I protect my tastebuds at all costs when it comes to spice. I snapped this photo just before Ana was about to start making a big batch of kimchi for the week and it’s one of my favourite photos from our final year house. Happiness and food, all in one.
