Eggs Directory: Our Easter Egg Rankings

We put a host of Easter eggs through their literal and metaphorical paces, with spectacular results

Feature by Peter Simpson | 07 Apr 2017

Easter; it’s the festive holiday that centres primarily around the consumption of chocolate, as opposed to Christmas which just makes the pursuit of the brown stuff an ancillary goal to trying to get a new Playstation or loads of wicked-cool socks. Ever since the first Easter eggs were doled out in the mid-1800s, we’ve come to associate the coming of spring with the chirping of birds, sprouting of crocuses, and rising blood sugar levels brought on by trying to eat all of the Creme Eggs. But now, with the Easter egg biz worth millions every April, and grown children everywhere keen to get wired into large piles of chocolate, it’s time to take stock of the situation. Take stock, then roll that stock down a makeshift hill before smashing it into a million pieces.

We’ve acquired a series of chocolate eggs in varying shapes, sizes and configurations, and now it’s time to put them through a rigorous five-stage scrutinisation process. We’re looking at everything that makes an Easter egg great, that sends you back to carefree childhood days of eating so much you become violently ill and have to be restrained. Those glorious childhood days. Speaking of looks, let’s begin with…

Stage 1: Packaging
Your host has the visual sensibilities of a concussed goat, so for part one we roped in our designer, a grown man with a child who almost certainly had better things to do than be shouted at about chocolate packaging on a Monday afternoon. Still, he gamely soldiered on, casting his eye over our cast of characters. Here, we’re looking at the exterior wrapping on these bad boys – does it shine bright like a diamond, will I want to eat it, can it be confused with a candle if you don’t have your glasses on, that sort of thing.

That last remark, by the way, is directed at Lidl’s Deluxe Dark Mocha egg (£3.49). Yo Lidl, this is Easter, not the sales material for a mid-tier credit card. Jazz up your packaging a bit – we know you’re into the whole ‘floating in a world of white marble’ thing because that’s luxury in a nutshell, but try to lighten up a bit. The clear winner in the design stakes was The Chocolate Tree’s Luxury milk chocolate egg (£15.95), with a simple design that showed off the egg within, plus nifty top and tail holders to stop you accidentally flinging the thing on the ground. Top stuff. The rest of them were pretty solidly in the Easter spirit – big pictures of pieces of chocolate, mild suggestions of spring-time wildlife, and lots of sweet, sweet corporate branding.  

The scores: Chocolate Tree 8/10; Maltesers, Creme Egg, and both the Cadbury's get 7; Moo Kind gets a 6; Lidl's needlessly-officious Deluxe gubbins can have a 4. 

Stage 2: Aesthetics

Time for some hot eye-on-egg action. Here we’re looking at the actual eggs themselves, underneath their foily exteriors. Turns out, a lot of them look like a dinosaur laid them, and we can’t work out why. Chickens lay actual eggs, and ‘spring chickens’ exist both metaphorically and literally, so surely the only reason that Big Choc would be daft enough to not just say ‘a chocolate hen laid this, now let’s just move on’ is that they’re hiding something. Something scaly, or not, depending on which paleontologist you listen to.

Dinosaur theories aside, this was a chance to vent our long-held childhood beliefs in what constitutes a good egg. The Maltesers egg (£2), a glossy hunk of paneled chocolate goodness, was praised as “the egg of your childhood”, which is both a great metaphor for the iconic power of branding and the actual truth. That the Moo Kind vegan egg (£4.25, Real Foods) looked almost identical was taken as something of an affront, while the Chocolate Tree effort was noted for being both Instagram-worthy and a little bit on the ornate side. Oh, and the Lidl egg, with a clump of chocolate coated coffee beans in one side, looked like it had a lump of frog spawn growing out of it. Delicious, caffeinated frog spawn.

Scores: The large Cadbury egg was a smooth, matt lump of chocolatey goodness (8/10), but the little Cadbury had a bit too much going-on (6). The Maltesers egg had the tesselation of an early-90s football (7), and the Lidl and Chocolate Tree options each had a touch too much going-on by comparison (6). The Moo Kind tried to trick us into confusing it with the Maltesers, dastardly behaviour worthy of a four (4).

Stage 3: Rollability
Your egg could look like it jumped straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and come in a magical self-opening box, but if it doesn’t roll straight and true then we don’t want to know. The act of rolling chocolate ovoids around makes – objectively speaking – no fucking sense, but it’s what everyone will do with their eggs, so we hatched a plan.

If you’ve never seen a host of Easter eggs set loose down a warped piece of MDF, like competitors in some demented chocolate version of the Kentucky Derby, then you haven’t lived. Here, the most stable and solid eggs performed best – the humble Creme Egg (60p) flew down the ramp like an incredibly sugary bullet, followed closely by the Lidl effort which gained some traction thanks to that frog spawn from earlier weighing it down. The Moo Kind took bronze, but with an asterisk, as we suspect its lack of milk may have given it a slight stability advantage.

Our pair of Cadbury eggs (£4, £7) came in fourth and fifth respectively – although the bigger one gets a bonus point for staying in its lane all the way down – and the ‘egg of your childhood’ made like you did at every childhood sports day, veering off course early on and bumbling into second-last place. The Chocolate Tree egg’s ornate detailing proved to be its downfall – it bounced around, went off the edge of the ramp, and broke apart on the floor. Last place, but a bonus point for a spectacular flameout that sent a bag of delicious chai almonds sailing through the air. As you'll see, dramatic stuff. Dramatic, shambolic stuff.

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Stage 4: Smashability
Dropping a standard egg – chicken, duck, possibly quail if you like to live a little/ are a big-time baller – is a disaster. You scratch your hand, your shoe is covered in egg, you try to get a towel but you slip on some of the residue, you fall, you can’t get up, and so on. Nobody wants to break an egg, which may explain why when the opportunity to break some chocolate eggs came up – a scenario where the worst that could happen is a stomach ache and a bollocking from the dentist – the office became a hive of mildly terrifying activity.

The Chocolate Tree egg was praised for a clean break with some jagged edges to allow one to nibble away without feeling like a glutton, while the Cadbury numbers offered a little too much squidgy resistance when smashed with palms and foreheads respectively. The boss stepped in to despatch the Maltesers egg – the one from your childhood, remember – with one “satisfying” punch a la John Wick, rendering it smashed and ready for feasting.

The designer from earlier smashed the Moo Kind egg with an empty bottle in an accidental remake of the most gruesome scene in Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Lidl egg… well, it turns out that you need a reasonable amount of force to crack an egg that’s rammed full of coffee beans, but not quite as much force as you get by throwing the thing full force at the table from head height. Just watch this... you'll see what we mean. Maybe one to play by ear on Easter Sunday.

The aftermath: 9/10 for the Lidl's spectacular explosion, 8 for the clean crack of the Chocolate Tree effort, the Maltesers and Moo Kind both get 7 on account of being identical, the smooshing of the Cadbury eggs sees the small get a 6/10 and the large a 5/10, and 4 for the Creme Egg. It squished all over our palm. Bad times.

Stage 5: Taste

And after all that, after subjecting our cast of characters to a bizarre mix of physical interrogation and beauty pageant, it was time to actually taste the chocolate. There’s something particular about Easter egg chocolate – maybe it’s the fact that it’s always been pawed by three or four people before ingestion, or the fact we don’t normally eat chocolate by the handful for the rest of the year, but there’s a very particular vibe we’re looking for. Malleable, flavoursome, but not so sweet that you couldn’t polish off the lot if you wanted to – essentially, we’re looking for the ‘house wine’ of chocolate.

The Cadbury’s eggs drew favourable comments on the creaminess front, but lacked some of the immediate tooth-screaming sugar hit we’ve come to associate with big-name chocolate. The Maltesers egg did better, offering a creamier and smoother finish (stop sniggering, that’s our childhood you’re besmirching with your filth), while the Moo Kind had us fooled for a minute with a rich, full flavour before the standard aftertaste of vegan chocolate kicked in – an admirable effort in tricky circumstances.

Creme Eggs were correctly deemed to be delicious, although they lost much of their shine because they don’t smash as spectacularly as others, and the Chocolate Tree’s superpowered Madagascan chocolate divided opinion with its bitter punch and full-bodied finish. The Lidl egg did prove to be something of a fan favourite – bitter, sharp dark chocolate with a strong coffee punch, exactly the flavours to punch into the tastebuds of a bunch of jaded millennial caffeine addicts. They may not know how to package the thing, but Lidl seem to know their audience.

Our findings
With the dust settled, shards of cocoa picked from the carpet, and sugar highs beginning to abate, we’ve come to some conclusions. The ideal chocolate egg should spark childhood nostalgia, transporting us to carefree days of Augustus Gloop-ing it up big style. At the same time, it should pack enough of a punch to wake a cadaver.

The packaging should be simple and elegant, but the egg itself should lend itself to being smashed to bits in a cathartic display of mindless destruction. That’s all we want – a sweet, bitter, modern but childlike Easter egg that blows up like a firework and moves like an elephant on a skateboard – and given that the chocolate industry has apparently been breeding dinosaurs for years, we’re sure they can find a way to hook us up.

The final scores...

Top of the Chocs: 4 of Scotland's best chocolatiers

Still none the wiser about which chocolate to plump for this Easter? Fear not; here's our guide to the best of Scotland's chocolate-mongers...

The Chocolate Tree
Crafting their chocolate from bean to bar, The Chocolate Tree take the choc biz seriously. The results really do shine through, and their range of chocolates sourced from producers around the world is hard to match. 

Coco Chocolatier
Unexpected flavours are the name of the game from Coco – from haggis spice to gin and tonic via orange, lemon and geranium, there’s always something on the Coco shelves that you won’t have seen before. 

Edward and Irwyn
Artisan chocolatiers in the truest sense, you’ll need to act fast to snap up E&I’s wares if you see them, but trust us, they’re worth it. The duo’s chocolate honeycomb is the stuff of wonder, and their chocolate-coated caramels are among the best chocolates we’ve tasted. And we eat a lot of the stuff. 

Mary’s Milk Bar
Better known for their wildly popular gelato, the Milk Bar also serves up a host of exciting and intriguing chocolates. The menu changes regularly, but say phrases like ‘Sriracha Almond’ and ‘Malted Caramel’ in our vicinity and we’ll be paying attention.