When Abergavenny coffee shop owner Bryan Harris and his partner Laura Masson dreamed up a cracking idea for an ‘Easter egg hot chocolate special’ little did they know that their 40-second video would go viral on social media.

The recipe was simple - if not one for the diet-conscious. Take a medium-sized chocolate egg, stand it up in a large mug, cave in the top, fill with hot chocolate, marshmallows and cream and finish with extra marshmallows and chocolate sauce.

Nothing could have prepared them for the fact that, one week on, Bryan’s demonstration video would have received nearly 4.8 million Facebook views from as far afield as Brazil, Greece and Australia.

“The weirdest part is it’s almost certainly nothing new - in fact my daughter Faith has melted Easter eggs like that before,” said Bryan.

“I think people picked up on the fact that it was a fun thing to try at home and it just captured the imagination.”

Bryan set up his own business - The Coffee Pot in Nevill Street - 18 months ago after running a Costa franchise in the town for several years, and before that working for Whitbread.

“I’d always wanted my own place. I believed great coffee and great service was a formula I could replicate without the influence of the corporate big wigs,” he said.

He encourages his baristas Paul and Richard and trainee Anwen to create their own personal ‘signatures’ for the frothy coffees such as teddy bears, ghosts, witches, rugby balls, dragons, swans, bears, butterflies, snowmen - often to coincide with a special occasion like Halloween or a Welsh rugby international.

“Laura and I are always discussing ideas at home. There’s a lot of competition in the town and we need to come up with things that are new and fresh so we thought we’d experiment with putting hot chocolate inside an Easter egg.

“I bought a few from B&M on Good Friday to see how it went and asked the store manager to put some aside for me.

“On Saturday morning at 7am I made a short video of the trial special and put it out on Facebook. I actually tried that one myself, which was a bit of a challenge first thing in the morning. Laura banned me from having another one after that!

“At that stage we only had around 200 regular Facebook followers who take an interest in the new cakes we put on the menu and things like that.

“By Saturday night we’d done about half a dozen and had 30,000 Facebook hits, which we thought was fantastic.

“To begin with I did my best to post comments but the hits were increasing in tens of thousands! By Monday it was going completely mad and it finally peaked on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“People were calling in here from Swansea, Cardiff, the Rhondda, Caerphilly, Chepstow, even a family from Birmingham. One local family said they’d been contacted by family members in Australia asking if they knew about it.

“Mostly the kids would start the special then find it a bit rich and pass it over to the grown-ups to finish off. Then the adults started asking if they could try filling the egg full of coffee instead.

“I suppose over the Bank Holiday weekend we sold more than 100. When B&M ran out of the particular egg we were using I started sourcing them from Tesco - and bought all their stock too.

“I’m known for being a bit flamboyant and I did my best to make a performance out of each one we made, getting the whole shop involved.

“Customers were doing selfies and putting them on their own Facebook pages while people from all over the UK and from other countries were contacting family members living locally.

“There were also comments from people in cities across the UK like London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow asking if we owned coffee shops they could visit where THEY lived!

“By Monday the hits were around the million mark. We never dreamed this could happen. We eventually sold our last special on Wednesday.

“A week later our Facebook page shows that we’ve received a total of 22,000 reactions to the video, 50,000 comments, 26,000 shares and nearly 4.8m views. And from just 227 regular followers we now have 7,374!

“It was one of the best week’s we’ve had since we’ve been here - equal to the Food Festival.

“We didn’t realise the power of social media before, but we certainly do now!”