People often ask, “What’s the perfect food for doing taxes?”
My answer is the delicious and non-nutritious Cadbury Creme Egg. With its simple concept and sweetly unnatural ingredients, the egg provides a perfect escape from the all-too-real world of deductibles and itemizations.
I was eating just such a treat the other day when a thought struck me: Didn’t these things used to come out around Easter?
I ate my first one this year in January. JANUARY! How far back can they push this limited-opportunity opportunity? Christmas? How weird would that be to explain to kids?
“Here’s your Christmas Creme Egg, honey. Eat it all up and don’t ask me again how a holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ is associated with the eating of fake chocolate eggs starting just after his birthday.”
It seems that this not the first time this crazy candy has caused controversy recently. First, some dude got pretty famous (Internet-wise, at least) for doing what so many of us have dreamed of doing – substituting creme eggs for real eggs in a cake recipe. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out so well.
Then, it was revealed that the current size of the egg is indeed smaller than it used to be – a fact uncovered by that guy from The Office during an appearance on some NBC talk show. (How’s that for detailed reporting?)
All of which brings me to this interesting, but somewhat unrelated point: Chocolate is hard to make.
If you look at how labor-intensive and time-consuming a process it is to transform cacao seeds into the thing we call chocolate (as detailed here), I think we can allow for a few PR hiccups now and again.
No matter how it shrinks, how early in the year it debuts, or how poor a substitute it makes for the genuine foodstuff on which it’s actually based, I’ll keep eating the creme egg.
Unless they change the definition of chocolate. That I cannot abide.
