Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could have bought at any old corner shop. In 2019, a mega-fan from Liverpool had a Creme Egg tattooed on her hip.
I have never understood the love for something so mediocre. Creme Eggs are a cheerless chocolate. What I find perplexing is why anyone would find a confectionary that resembles the albumen and yolk of a soft-boiled egg appealing. (Although a friend assures me that the 1970s ‘Border’ version, which came in a natty tartan wrapping and swapped out the usual filling for chocolate fondant, was actually rather good.)
You’d think a glance at a Creme Egg’s ingredients would be enough to put people off, but apparently not. Each 40g ‘egg’ includes 26g of sugar as well as something called invert sugar syrup, made from an unholy mix of monosaccharide glucose and fructose – 1.3 times sweeter than regular sugar.
Further down the list you’ll find two kinds of vegetable fat, palm and shea (isn’t that what they use in soap?) as well as a malicious dash of emulsifier (E442) and some actual dried egg white for token authenticity. Paprika extract gives the ‘yolk’ its orange fluorescent glow. It’s almost impressive that, despite all these additives, Creme Eggs remain utterly tasteless apart from the cloying sting of industrial sweetener.
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