Easter Egg Surprise Cakes

The surprise when you crack open one of these eggs is.... there's cake inside!

I can't take credit for this idea at all. I saw it on Ros's blog The More Than Occasional Baker last Easter, and immediately bookmarked it for next year; though she says she got the idea from another website and it may have come from somewhere else before that!

I've been carefully breaking eggshells by using a spoon to make a hole at one end every time I've used eggs recently, so I could wash out the shells and keep them relatively intact. Today I set about making the cake to go inside. Ros made multicolour cakes but said her mum had made the suggestion of putting small balls of marzipan inside to look like a yolk. When I saw that, I remembered I had bought some white cake mix when I was in America; I'm not usually a fan of packet mix but I wanted to see how this would turn out. The white cake would contrast perfectly with the yellow marzipan and make pretty realistic eggs.

You just add some water, oil and three egg whites to the packet cake mix, it only took a minute to mix together. It tasted incredibly sweet though, and was much more runny than the cake mixture I would normally make.

I could only get hold of 'white' marzipan rather than yellow; it was still slightly yellow in colour but not that much so I added some Dr. Oetker yellow gel colouring and kneaded it in (this is the before picture).

 I rolled several small balls of marzipan, though some of them turned out to be too big so I broke them in half and made two.

Here are some of the egg shells I saved and washed out. The holes aren't particularly neat but that doesn't really matter.

I put the cake mixture into a piping bag and piped some in to each shell, then placed a ball of marzipan inside, then filled in the shells with some more cake mixture. It was quite messy as it was so runny!

They only took 15 minutes in the oven, though I obviously overfilled the shells as a lot of the cake came out.

I learnt how to do it better on the second batch and the cake only spilled out slightly.

Here's a very unassuming box of eggs... I plan to take them into work and offer them around, which will get me a few strange looks!

Until people start peeling the shells off, that is! I was pleased the white cake mix genuinely did come out white unlike 'normal' cake which is more of a golden brown in colour. I guess they do that by bleaching the flour somehow.

Here's the cake 'egg' nestling in the egg box

When you cut it in half, the marzipan really does look like an egg yolk!

I'm really pleased with these; they were easy to make though messy to fill the eggs. But I think they will make a great Easter surprise!

I'm sending these to Calendar Cakes, hosted by Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel of Dollybakes, as their theme this month is Easter.

I'm also sending this to Bookmarked Recipes, hosted by Jacqueline of Tinned Tomatoes.