Marie provided these recipes and she made all of these chocolate eggs … and they were great! I have modified the recipes with more detail and more modern procedures to assure success.
The three recipes below all use the same dipping procedure for the chocolate coating. You may choose to vary the mixture of chocolates, milk and dark, to what pleases you best. Typically coconut eggs are coated with dark chocolate, while peanut butter eggs are coated with milk chocolate. Fruit and nut eggs are good with a mixture of both types of chocolate.
You may or may not have the recommended brands of chocolate described in the coating/dipping procedure. If that is the case you may substitute using either Lindt® or Ghirardelli® high quality, high cacao content chocolate bars, noting that following that method is quite expensive. You are far better off ordering excellent quality chocolate in advance in bulk 11 pound blocks. I recommend the Callebaut® NV845 milk chocolate and one of their semi-sweet dark chocolate choices perfect for dipping, like No 811. You can buy the bulk chocolate blocks online via Amazon® to Worldwide Chocolates® with free shipping for roughly $5 to $8 per pound, depending on specific type of chocolate, and that is a terrific savings for a vastly superior chocolate. Leftover/excess blocks of chocolate are best stored vacuum sealed in a dark cool place to keep them perfectly fresh for later use ... even two years later!
Coconut Eggs:
½ cup of butter
8 oz. of cream cheese
2, one pound boxes of confectioners sugar
14 oz. of shredded sweetened coconut
1 to 1 1/2 tsp. of coconut flavoring (Like Olive Nations® pure coconut extract)
2 tsp. of vanilla
Melt the butter and the cream cheese in a large saucepan on low heat. Turn off the heat. Add the sugar, coconut, coconut flavoring extract and vanilla and mix thoroughly. You will find that mixing using your hands is the easiest way to blend all the ingredients once the sugar has been incorporated into the butter and cream cheese mixture. Put the mixture into a shallow serving dish and cover it with plastic wrap.
Chill the mixture ½ to 1 hour in the refrigerator.
Form the mixture into eggs about two inches long and roughly one inch in diameter in the middle and place them well spaced on parchment paper covered 12"x17" cookie sheets, slightly flattening the bottoms.
Dip the eggs in melted chocolate as described below.
Chocolate Coating Procedure:
Melt a mixture of one and one half to two pounds of small (shaved from a large 11 lb. chocolate block to roughly 1"x1/4"x1/4") pieces of Callebaut® High Cacao Dipping Chocolate (Milk and Dark), gradually and carefully using a microwave oven on high heat in multiple steps with intermediate stirring/mixing, using a three to five inch deep, six to eight inch wide microwave safe plastic or natural fiber bowl. Do not use a narrow top/deep bowl as that will make the stirring and the later dipping processes far more difficult. Do not use a glass or china bowl as they can easily overheat and destroy the chocolate. The ideal container is a bowl made of polypropylene with a microwave oven safety/use rating of 5. If the small symbol on the bottom of the bowl has the number 5 then that bowl is polypropylene and safe to use for melting chocolate.
Heat the chocolate in successively shorter periods with complete stirring after each heating. Start with one minute, then 30 seconds, then 10 seconds for as many 10 second periods as are required to completely melt the chocolate after stirring.
Aim for a temperature of 92 degrees F to melt the chocolate but do not exceed a temperature of 94 degrees F. Use a good instant/quick read thermometer and careful stirring/mixing between heating cycles to assure an even and correct temperature throughout the melted chocolate. The idea is that keeping the chocolate temperature at or below 94 degrees F will guarantee that the chocolate will not lose temper. Also, I watched a candy maker use a flat paddle as a stirrer so I tried it and found it to be perfect as chocolate that would cling to a spoon and be hard to remove during heating is easily scraped from a flat paddle stirrer back into the bowl.
Dip the eggs into the melted chocolate individually to coat them, move each egg around in the melted chocolate and then remove it using two dinner forks, allowing excess melted chocolate to drip back into the bowl of chocolate, then put it on a parchment paper covered cookie sheet and let it rest until all of the eggs have cooled and the coating is solid, or alternatively follow the "shock" procedure described below. Typically, small chocolate dipped candy is removed from the bowl of melted chocolate using an inexpensive plastic tool with a thin loop at the bottom. Larger pieces like the Easter eggs are easily handled using two dinner forks, one in each hand, to rotate or flip the candy in the melted chocolate and then to get underneath it from both sides, lift it out of the chocolate, let excess chocolate drip back into the bowl and finally transfer the coated candy to the parchment paper.
If you have freezer space you can "shock" the chocolate by putting the cookie sheet with the coated eggs into the deep freeze for 15 minutes immediately following coating. That procedure will help to produce a glossy surface. Then wrap each egg individually with plastic wrap and put them into a container with a top that seals well, then store the container in a cool, dark place.
Eat the eggs within one week for maximum quality. If refrigerated they will last up to three weeks.
Peanut Butter Eggs: (Yields 36 eggs)
½ cup of butter
10 oz. of cream cheese
1 1/2 pounds of confectioners sugar
3 1/2 cups of peanut butter
1 tbsp. of Olive Nation® Peanut Butter Flavor Extract (optional)
2 tsp. of vanilla
3 oz. of white chocolate
Melt the butter, (optional) peanut butter flavor extract, the cream cheese and the white chocolate in a large saucepan on low heat while stirring.
Put the melted mixture into the electric mixer bowl, then add the peanut butter gradually while running on medium speed. Add the vanilla and mix it in.
Add in the powdered sugar gradually while mixing on low speed and then mix on medium speed for three minutes.
Cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap and chill the mixture for 1 hour in the refrigerator.
Form the mixture into eggs (squeezing each together in your hand) about two inches long and one inch thick in the middle and put them on parchment paper covered 12"x17" baking sheets with the bottoms slightly flattened.
Use the chocolate coating procedure shown above for the coconut eggs.
Fruit and Nut Eggs:
½ cup of butter
8 oz. of cream cheese
2, one pound boxes of confectioners sugar
1 cup of Chopped Nuts (walnut halves, roasted almonds or pecan halves chopped into roughly four pieces each)
1 cup of cut Maraschino Cherries (each cherry cut into four pieces and all pieces pressed between paper towels to eliminate wetness) or 1/2 cup of cherry pieces and 1/2 cup of crushed canned pineapple pieces processed to eliminate wetness using paper towels
2 tsp. of vanilla
Cut the cherries on a cutting board and spread the cherry pieces on a paper towel. Put another paper towel on top and press to absorb the cherry syrup into the paper towels. Fill a one cup measuring cup with the pieces. Set the cherry pieces aside. As an alternative recipe, you can instead use 1/2 cup of the cherry pieces and 1/2 cup of crushed canned pineapple pieces that have first been thoroughly de-wetted using the paper towel procedure used for the cherry pieces.
Melt the butter and cream cheese in large saucepan on low heat. Turn off the heat. Add the sugar, chopped nuts, cherry/pineapple pieces and vanilla and mix thoroughly. If the mixture is too sticky to handle then add additional powdered sugar and mix. Repeat as necessary until the mixture is not excessively sticky. Note also that you can dust your hands with corn starch to make handling of slightly sticky products easy.
Put the mixture into a serving dish and cover it with plastic wrap and chill ½ to 1 hour in the refrigerator.
Form the mixture into eggs about two inches long and one inch in diameter in the middle and put them on parchment paper covered cookie sheets with the bottoms slightly flattened. If necessary, first dust your hands with corn starch. If you find the product to be too soft to hold an egg shape during later dipping in melted chocolate then freeze the egg shaped pieces prior to dipping them in the melted chocolate.
Use the chocolate coating procedure shown above for the coconut eggs.