That’s right, we have large chocolate eggs, that frequently holder smaller eggs or other chocolate, sold in an excessive amount of packaging - all kids get loads on Easter Sunday and many adults too. All the big manufacturers like Cadburys make ones in the flavours of their favourite chocolate bars. And there’s often an extra gift such as a branded mug. The supermarkets dedicate huge aisles to the stuff.
Even as a youngish (8-9) child, the afikomen in my household was $$ cash $$ which made the search very intense.
I do recall one year we were on vacation over the Easter holiday season and my step-mom (who participated at temple with us, but was not Jewish herself) set up an Easter-inspired riddle hunt in the cabin we were staying in which was a ton of fun, but probably more about getting us (my brother and I) distracted after we’d been a few days without TV and other entertainment. And it worked!
Otherwise, never had Easter candies in the house, although after the holiday, I got to share a good bit of the friends loot - and it reminded me of the other major holiday themed candy extravaganza, X-mas, in that the vast majority of the ‘chocolate’ was sooooo amazingly crappy!
As a kid, I’d still EAT it, happily no less, but OMG, now? Get that stuff away from me, I need to be careful enough with calories and sugar without impulse consuming crap.
By Americanized, I mean the Kinder eggs that meet food regulations of no toy inside. It’s almost comical. You have a plastic egg separated into 2 halves, separately sealed with a pull off lid. One side contains a small toy/activity. The other side has some sort of cream/chocolate filling you can scoop out.
Lindt Easter bunnies are tasty, imho. Honestly, some of the other ones are, too. It’s Hanukah chocolate that is uniformly terrible, in my experience. Which is too bad, since chocolate coins are nearly universal in the kids’ celebrations.
I think the true answer is implicit in your statement - candy (especially chocolate) aimed at kids is almost universally terrible. Because if it’s sweet, they’ll eat almost anything.
Chocolate, and other candy to a somewhat lesser extent, aimed at adults tends to be higher quality and -certainly- more expensive.
I’ve had gelt made at local confectionaries made of much higher grade chocolate that I had no issues with, and I’m sure there are major brands that sell quality Easter/X-mas/etc versions as well. I suspect you won’t see them in the major American Mega-marts taking up entire aisles though.
I think Folly is right about this. The cultural niche filled by those big hollow chocolate Easter eggs in the U.K. is filled by large chocolate bunnies in the U.S.
Large chocolate bunnies in the U.S. are commonly hollow, but not invariably so (though the larger the bunny, the greater the chance it will be hollow). Even when hollow, however, these chocolate bunnies are nearly never filled with anything – perhaps as a boutique upscale confection, but not as an ordinary Easter item in the shops.
Looking at your Cadbury Gifts Direct link, I see some Cadbury items that are well-known and popular in the U.S. – most notably the Mini Eggs and the Creme Eggs. Cadbury apparently makes hollow bunnies, too.
I hadn’t realized that Cadbury chocolate products sold in the U.S. are manufactured by Hershey. Does anyone know if this is still true (article is from 2018).
Canada had both of these treats when I was a kid (in the '70s/'80s). From what I’ve seen, the big eggs have waned in popularity; I don’t know if it’s because of the choking hazard thing or the over-packaging thing or something completely different.
I’m not even sure how you would fill a chocolate egg or bunny. Here in the US, at least, the bunnies are made by inserting a nozzle into a chilled mold and sprayed in all directions as the nozzle is withdrawn. The mold is cold enough the chocolate solidifies moments after contact so it hasn’t time to move much.
I knew a guy who worked in one of the confection factories and before Easter and Christmas (Santas) they’d be doing that for several weeks. His job was to make sure the item fell out when the mold opened – very boring.
With chocolate bunnies, the big topic of debate is whether to eat the head first or last. And one American newspaper comic has as a recurring gag that the mother always bites off the ears of the daughter’s chocolate bunny before Easter.
And it’d be tough to put anything inside the typical American chocolate Easter bunny, just because they’re not very voluminous: A bunny is an irregular shape to begin with, and they’re usually pretty flat from side to side.
