Battle of the Creme Eggs!

I’ve been a huge Cadbury Creme Egg fan since childhood. While I have to admit I was disappointed when Hershey’s (who sells them under license in the United States) reduced the size from 40 grams to 34 grams in 2006, they are still my candy of choice. The following fast facts come from the Cadbury Sweppes Creme Egg fact sheet:

• In the UK, Cadbury Creme Egg is the most popular (unit sales) chocolate single sold between January and Easter, outselling its rival by more than 2 to 1.
• The Cadbury Creme Egg plant at Bournville can ‘lay’ 66,000 Creme Eggs every hour - more than 1.5 million eggs a day.
• Creme Egg is made all year round on the Bournville plant; even though we only sell the eggs to retailers between January and Easter.
• If you laid all the eggs made on the Creme Egg plant end to end, they would stretch all the way from the Bournville factory in Birmingham, UK to Sydney in Australia - that’s 12,000 miles!
• In the UK, over 200 million Creme Eggs are sold annually, 3 for every person in the UK.

If you get a chance, you should also check out their “Goo-ology” page, where Cadbury proudly boasts that that “Creme eggs come in to the world with a single purpose: to get their goo out.” I’m not even going to touch that one.
I was visiting Walgreen’s this evening, checking out the post-Easter sale in the candy aisle. Most of the candy had been cleared out to make room for a depressing array of summer items (now that the Christmas/Valentines/St. Patrick’s Day/Easter season is over). There were, however, a few creme eggs left- but few Cadbury ones. I noticed a box of Russell Stover Dark Chocolate Creme Eggs, so I tossed one in my basket as I am a big fan of dark chocolate. Then, behind all the other boxes of candy, I found one remaining box of Cadbury Creme Eggs. I couldn’t resist, so I tossed a few of those in my basket as well.

I poured a glass of fine merlot to accompany the creme egg tasting. I started with the Stover egg. The wrapper came off easily. The egg’s surface was dark in color, due to the dark chocolate, and yielded to the pressure of my teeth. The filling was thicker than a Cadbury Egg, and definitely more rich. It was chocolate. It had some sort of yolk in the middle, but the entire inside tasted like chocolate frosting. The flavor was actually a bit too strong, I think if it was a small bite-size candy it would be okay, but this was just too much “frosting.”

Creme Egg interiors: Russell Stover on the left, Cadbury on the right

Now it was on to my old favorite, the Cadbury Creme Egg. No surprises here, just classic Cadbury goodness. While there is definitely a place for the Stover Egg, it’s not at Easter. Maybe I could see myself eating one of those rich chocolate eggs at Chrismas, or maybe on Thanksgiving, the Cadbury Egg was designed with Easter in mind. I could see the Cadbury bunny in my head as the gooey goodness dripped down the chocolate shell and on to my hands. The intense sugar rush kicked in and I was quickly reminded of why I  scour the candy aisle on February 15th to see if the Easter Candy has arrived.