Easter candy! It’s a world of pastel shades and artificial flavors that can either delight or dismay. Let's delve into the experience of tasting various Easter treats, focusing particularly on Russell Stover's Iddy Biddy Bunnies.
We like to taste things. It’s understandable-a good excuse to take a few minutes off from the grind, to gather around a communal table, spend some time in conversation with fellow writers or editors and taste or rank whatever we can get our hands on. But Easter candy? We thought it would be fun.
There’s just something so forced about the very idea of most Easter candies, so blatantly artificial and pastel-shaded, that after a few bites of THIS marshmallow-stuffed blob or THAT chocolate-covered horror, it, well … it starts to weigh down on you. It breaks your spirit and steals your innocence. Perhaps 10 candies would have been fun and games. Tasting 22 different ones at once?
And so, we decided to document the experience and create the below matrix, which displays where each candy landed in our informal scoring. The two axis were determined by 1-10 ratings, which ranged from “bad to good” in terms of flavor and “conventional to weird” in terms of presentation or execution. We also took a moment to jot down a few notes about each-hopefully they’ll give you an idea of what to seek out or avoid in your own Easter basket.
Russell Stover Iddy Biddy Bunnies: A Closer Look
These are chocolate bunnies so small that Russell Stover has deemed them downright iddy biddy. They come 50 to a package, much like bed bugs in a roadside mattress. In fact, sprinkling these insidious delicacies onto the sheets of an enemy’s bed would give quite the scare. Make sure to purchase several cases for future use.
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By no means are these tiny chocolate bunnies bad, but they’re oddly unsatisfying. Tastes of milk chocolate and impending regret. The chocolate is okay, certainly much better than the disgusting Little Beauty chocolate bunny, but who has ever wanted a candy that consists of really, really small bits of pure chocolate? M&M’s are coated in a candy shell for this very reason-tiny little pieces of chocolate have a tendency to melt.
Russell Stover made the sour chocolate bunnies in Iddy Biddy Bunny size (as shown), as well as three-ounce bunnies, and one-ounce eggs.
It's not surprising that it was a box of Russell Stover chocolates that Forrest Gump held in his hands when he uttered the now-famous line, "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get" in the 1994 Tom Hanks classic (via Russell Stover). The movie Forrest Gump was pure Americana, and so is Russell Stover, which is now the largest producer of boxed chocolates in the nation. and Canada.
When you consider how famous Russell Stover is for its boxed chocolates, it's easy to forget that Russell Stover also makes plenty of candy that isn't chocolate. They even make candy that isn't even sweet, well, at least not at first.
In fact, Russell Stover has even sold sour chocolate, as in sour chocolate bunnies for Easter. "Russell Stover is looking to change your idea of a traditional chocolate bunny...by offering something new: a colorful, white-fudge bunny that is hiding a secret sour flavor!" reported Simplemost during the lead-up to Easter 2020.
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Russell Stover - SNL
Other Easter Candy Considerations
Let's take a look at some other Easter candies that were part of the tasting experience:
- Cadbury Creme Egg: A classic of the genre, your appreciation of a Cadbury Creme Egg is likely determined entirely by your resistance to the massively sugary “creme” goo that one finds in the interior.
- Chocolate-Covered Peeps: To say that chocolate-covered Peeps are not aesthetically pleasing would be a gross understatement-they look like something your insolent dog might leave as a surprise in your loafers for daring to challenge his authority. The chocolate coating is terrible. The artificial, gummy marshmallow inside isn’t much better.
- Chocolate Crisp: A weirdly complicated name to essentially mean “chocolate crisp,” in the style of a Nestle Crunch, this is classic Easter candy-just your standard chocolate bunny, with a bit of a crunch to liven things up.
- Hershey’s Chocolate-Covered Marshmallow Eggs: Duking it out with Chocolate Peeps for the title of “worst chocolate-covered marshmallow” is the offering from Hershey’s, which features incredibly bland, tasteless marshmallows and the usual Hershey’s chocolate you’ve known all your life.
- Marshmallow Chicks and Bunnies: They’re simple, you can say that for them. It’s just a bag of simple, pastel-colored, really awful marshmallows.
- Birthday Cake Peeps: Here’s one that actually took us by surprise in a pleasant way for once. We didn’t expect much from this violently blue twist on the classic Peep, but the addition of the “birthday cake and frosting” flavor, through whatever sorcery conjured it up, was actually most welcome in making the marshmallow taste more like a solid, well-conceived flavor rather than a tasteless blob or mass of pure sugar. This was definitely our favorite in the marshmallow/Peep subgenre of weird Easter candies.
- Classic Peeps: The classic Peep is a bit better than some of the other marshmallow junk if only because it’s coated in a fine layer of granulated sugar, which helps the mallow actually taste like something and gives is a bit of texture. It’s certainly better than the “marshmallow chicks and bunnies,” but let’s all be honest and admit to ourselves that the most fun thing one can do with Peeps isn’t eating them but rather putting them in the microwave to watch them explode.
- Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs: They’re Reese’s classic peanut butter cups, except in egg form. They’re delicious, with just the right chocolate to peanut butter ratio.
- White Chocolate Reese’s Eggs: These larger, white chocolate-coated eggs were strange and a bit divisive-although we still love the sweetened peanut butter filling you find in any Reese’s, we question whether white chocolate works as a pairing … particularly because one can barely even taste the actual white chocolate on these things. The peanut butter ratio is far stronger here, which makes them a touch overbearing and unbalanced.
- Jelly Beans: Once again, if you’ve never had a jelly bean in your life, there’s probably very little I can do at this point to really sell you on the concept.
- Jolly Rancher Sour Twists: Like a lot of sour candies, these twists on a jolly rancher are more interested in being sour than in delivering the original intent of the product (deliciously artificial fruit flavors). We can’t imagine any scenario where regular Jolly Ranchers wouldn’t be considered superior.
- Watermelon Peeps: We’re disturbed by the very idea of the concept’s genesis-who in their right mind looked at the marshmallow of a Peep and thought that pink, artificially watermelon-flavored sludge would be a great way to improve it? This person needs to be locked up. If he or she is walking among us, then society is not safe.
- Swedish Fish Eggs: There’s something vaguely off-putting in the realization that this product essentially claims to be candy caviar, but in terms of flavor they’re actually pretty damn awesome. What it actually boils down to is a multi-flavor pack for Swedish Fish that adds other great flavors such as orange (for the eggs). This might actually be superior to the regular Swedish Fish packages you see in stores for the rest of the year, if only for the novelty and variation.
- Whoppers Robin Eggs: A fun little spin on the usual, chocolate-coated Whoppers malted milk balls, the robin egg variant has a hard candy shell that is a bit more like an M&M, with a small amount of chocolate and that simultaneously chewy and crunchy interior that make Whoppers delicious in very small quantities and sickening when you eat more than a dozen.
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