Today I’m remembering …
… watching over Mum’s shoulder as she painstakingly crafted Easter eggs for each of us kids. That particular year they were black minstrels (in a time when such images were not yet seen as racist). Each minstrel’s body was a large chocolate egg on which rested his head with its hat, all meticulously shaped out of chocolate. Piped in royal icing onto the head was his smiling face, and he held a banjo made from a Bourbon biscuit piped with banjo strings. A process that took hours of patiently tempering chocolate, cooling it to a malleable temperature, and modelling each minute detail till you had three perfect chocolate minstrels, each one of a kind. Getting them just so entailed working into the night, after a long day in office and church ceremonies, but necessary, apparently, so that each kid could wake up to a special Easter morning surprise.