Easter eggs, a family tradition

I've spent two days creating our family fav, the Easter egg. I started making these in the 70's when I sent for an Eagle Brand recipe booklet. The booklet was lost when we moved and no eggs were to be had for nearly 10 years. :( Then! Along came the internet! I was able to find an updated version on the Eagle Brand website and have been making them again. So here's the recipe. And some tips.

Easter Eggs

1 stick butter, softened

1/2 t. salt

1 can Eagle Brand condensed milk

1 t. vanilla

9-10 C. pwd. sugar (a 2# bag)
almond bark
decorating frosting

With mixer, beat butter and salt together.

Gradually add milk and vanilla.

Beat in 6-8 cups of pwd. sugar, one cup at a time. Stir in by hand as much remaining sugar as you can.
Now this is where it gets fun. You decide what flavors you want. I'm sure you could get lots of inspiration from Truffles recipes. I have always made two kinds: Pecan, and Cherry Coconut. This year I experimented with a Chocolate Fudge.

For Pecan: Divide dough in half. Knead one half on pwd. sugar covered surface. Add 1 C. chopped pecans and knead into candy dough.

For Cherry Coconut: Into other half of dough, add 1 C. coconut and one small jar of marachino cherries which you have drained and chopped and drained again. Knead again. This dough will get sticky, so add more powdered sugar as you knead.

For Chocolate Fudge: Go back to the beginning of recipe. Add 2-3 melted squares of semi-sweet chocolate. I also added 1 C. cocoa to deepen the flavor. It was a drier dough, so more butter might be used. (I'm guessing, can you tell?) There is a chocolate eagle brand condensed milk that could work in this, but I didn't have that.

Divide the dough into equal sized pieces. Roll in your hands to an oval or "egg" shape. Mine are about 2 inches long. The chocolate batch is a whole recipe and yielded 36 eggs. You can see the powered sugar dusting they have.

Place molded eggs on waxed paper, cover and chill for 4 hrs.

Coating: Using Almond Bark, (I don't remember what I used in the 70's) or dipping chocolate, melt the bark. I don't have a great way of doing this, but 2 forks and a spoon worked. Drop one egg in the coating, spoon coating over it, pick up with serving size fork, tap on bowl (this smoothes out the coating, and helps extra coating to drip off), then use other fork to gently move on to waxed paper.

I used both chocolate and white coating. I made two recipes, about 6 dozen eggs. For 18 eggs, I used 2/3 of a pkg. of white coating. In all, I used about 1 1/2 pkg. of chocolate.

The next step is decorating. I made a simple buttercream frosting, dyed it three colors and decorated the eggs. Sometimes I use the color of decoration to keep track of the egg flavor. This time I used two different muffin papers-green for the chocolate eggs, white for the cherry coconut eggs and the pecan eggs are in white coating.

They're rich! Enjoy!