Creme Egg Review

Hold the front page! Bunnies! Puppets! Druids! David freaking Attenborough! Scoffology has reviewed the Cadbury's Creme Egg! It's only been out for 37 years! Read all about it after the jump!


There is something gloriously, life-affirmingly insane about a Creme Egg.

Take the packaging, for a start. It's like nothing else on earth. Most chocolate bars shout their clear, iconic message from on high. But the Creme Egg's nonsense-coloured foil packaging is more like the deranged natterings of an ether-addled bohemian genius. You can't even see the logo half the time. It used to have a couple of mad little chicks on. And yet the purple-red-yellow foil wrapper is instantly recognisable from half an aisle away. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that the Creme Egg is an ancient archetype that echoes through the centuries. Did druids at Stonehenge sacrifice shivering slaves on midsummer's dawn in the presence of a shiny rainbow egg? I think they did.

The Creme Egg is also insane by virtue of what it is. It's a bloody egg made of chocolate thicker than your thigh, and inside it is something exactly the same as what's inside a real egg - white and yolk and stickiness. Only translated mysteriously into the sweet world in such an utterly self-confident way that you've never paused to think how odd it is until right now. Does the yolk taste different from the white? Should it? Why does it always feel indefinably wrong to stop and observe the yolk and the white in their gooey glory, like accidentally looking into the wrong sex's lavatory? According to Wikipedia, the fondant is solid when it's first put in the chocolate shell. Then it's injected with an enzyme to liquify it for consumption. An enzyme! Of course it is! We wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Creme Egg was given its unique texture through cosmic rays, or a gypsy curse.

In fact, all the advertising around Creme Eggs has always emphasised the fact that they're clinically bonkers. When they were launched back in 71, there was a TV ad for a schoolboy asking a shopkeeper for 6000 of them. The Spitting Image puppets shilled them in the 90s, and egg-a-like Matt Lucas was the ideal choice to front a campaign in which/ he proclaimed, prophet-like, "I've seen the future - and it's egg-shaped!" And in the US, they're sold by a real rabbit that clucks like a chicken. Check out the video below.



A creme egg is also insane because, as the ad campaigns remind us, there's no right way to eat it. A Creme Egg is impossible to consume with any kind of dignity. It turns you into a snaffling, snorting egg-eating bear creature, pawing at the egg with the kind of gusto that would, if he were narrating you, give David Attenborough's voice that kindly, amused tone that we hope God has. "Using his perfectly designed forepaws, the human unwraps the delicate outer shell. Now, he begins to nibble at the top of the chocolate, perhaps hoping to break through to the fondant and suck it out. But... it is not to be. The human has become too greedy and is attempting to bite the top off the egg. In his haste to feed, the human has dropped the egg on the filthy pavement, leaving our very surprised looking human with traces of chocolate on its face and paws. Inevitably, the human will return to the shop to find another egg, and the cycle... begins again."

So here's to you, eggy-wegg, with your stains and your childishness. You're a symbol of chucklesome fun in a cold, grey world. A signifier of happy humanity. Stalin, we feel, would have no time for a Creme Egg. Well, Stalin was wrong. There, we said it. Let's hope the future remains as egg-shaped as ever.