Cadbury's Creme Eggs

Cadbury's Creme Eggs are a brand of confectionary made to look like a chocolate brown egg filled with white albumen and the yellow embryo utellus (or yolk).

They are based on the chicken's egg which has been a popular choice of food for thousands of years. Usually they are unfertilised as the hens are kept without roosters. However, just in case you're worried, if your egg happens to be fertilised it'll make little nutritional difference. Furthermore the refrigeration process that most eggs go through prevent the embryo from developing.

However, in the Phillippines, China, Laos and Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, you can buy and eat what are called, "wrapped eggs," "feathered eggs," or, "flush eggs."

These are eggs where the embryo inside has been incubated and allowed to develop for nine days and then held to the light to check their development. If they've developed well they're given a further 8 days to develop and then sold to be eaten.

If they haven't developed well they are sold as, "pennoy" which look, smell and taste like a regular hard-boiled egg.

When eaten at the 17 day mark the embryo hasn't developed well enough to develop a beak, feathers or claws. But there are some real connoisseurs who like them at 21 days, where they are more recognisable as a baby chick, and the bones are firm but tender.

The production of these eggs is all done by hand, and the people that do it take it very seriously, it's considered an artform with each vendor carefully caring for his eggs by hand.

They are sold both as snacks in a street market or in restaurants as haute quisine.

Some people take it even further by wrapping an egg in alkaline clay, ash, salt, lime (the mineral not the fruit) and crushed rice husks before burying it for several months. This causes the egg white to become a dark green like jade and the yoke to become a transparent brown. You now eat it with salt.

However, our eggs are chocolate ones. And are often given as gifts.

The giving of eggs as gifts started 2,000 years ago with the Zoroastrian New Year as a symbol of new life. The reason for the connection between the Easter Bunnies and giving out eggs is because hare forms (where they raise their young, like rabbit burrows or badger sets) are very similar to plover nests. Plovers are small birds similar to lapwings who bury their eggs. In Australia they use bilbies instead of bunnies. Those are small marsupials related to bandicoots. They look like long-nose rats.

The eggs became coloured following the Christian legend that Mary Magdalene was carrying some boiled eggs to share with her friends outside Jesus' tomb when Jesus arose. He turned her eggs red (and that's not a euphemism). Then Mary goes to the Emperor of Rome to tell him Jesus has risen. He doesn't believe her. Until the power of God turns his eggs red.

In the modern day these became chocolate eggs and so the Creme Egg is born. They're made by Cadbury's.

Cadbury's is the 2nd largest confectionary company in the world after Mars-Wrigley. Or it was until it was acquired by Kraft in 2010. It used to be Cadbury-Schweppes since 1969, but that demerged in 2007.

In 1824 John Cadbury sold hot drinks in Birmingham. He was a quaker and sold his delicious hot drinks to tempt people away from alcohol.

In 1854 Cadbury acquired a Royal Warrent.

1874 - Their hot chocolate proved so popular they dropped tea and coffee and just made the chocolatey stuff.

1879 - They assembled the Bournville factory in Birmingham, it was a village built for the workers and run strictly under the owners' Christian beliefs.

1905 - They produced the first chocolate bar, seeing off the competition by putting more milk into their chocolate than any of their competitors.

In 1928 they souped up their chocolate bar by adding fruit and nuts - which is still around today.

2010 They are acquired by Kraft for £11.5billion ($18.9billion) and controversially move much of the product production to Poland, keeping R&D in Birmingham.

The first thing you'll notice about Cadbury's Creme Eggs is that they're not Cadbury's Cream Eggs. This is because in many juristictions around the world cream must contain predominantly milk fats. Except of course for ice cream and salad cream - those are curious exceptions.

The creme egg is a choclate shell filled with a white and orange-coloured fondant. They make it by creating the orange bit first as a hard ball then injecting it with an enzyme. Then they make the white halves around it and inject those in enzymes, seal it up with chocolate and let the enzymes go to work to soften the fondant.

Previously they used invertase to make the fondant which enables the hydrolysis (breakdown) of sucrose (sugar) into fructose and glucose (different sugars) to form what is known in the industry as inverted sugar syrup. However this proved quite expensive and now they use Xylose isomerase to perform the same process.

The filling is a fondant which is super-saturated water. That is water that is saturated with sugar more than water normally can or should be. You heat water and vigorously stir in sugar as it cools to make a smooth texture. Improper stirring with lead to the sugar forming crunchy crystals.

It is this process that etymologically links "fondant" to the word "foundry."

Creme Egg season is the 1st Jan (New Year) to 24th April (don't know the significance of this latter date, it was however the birthday of William of Orange, the death of Daniel Defore and the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, the first war crime to be designated a "genocide" in history.)

Over 200 million are sold a year, requiring 1.5 million to be made each day.

The New Zealand Creme Egg is smaller than the British one.

There have been many types of different creme eggs in the past. These include:

Mini creme eggs,
Caramel
Chocolate fondant
Orange
Berry
Dairy Milk Bars with Creme Egg filling
Dream Eggs (with white chocolate on the outside)
Twisted (another type of Creme Egg-filling chocolate bar)
Creme Egg McFlurries from McDonalds
Peppermint
Jaffa
Swirled Chocolate Marble
and Screme Eggs - with green fondant for Halloween.

There have also been many high-profile advertising campaigns for Cadbury's Creme Eggs.

1970 - A small child orders 6,000 Creme Eggs from a shopkeeper
1985 - The highly successful How Do You Eat Yours campaign
1990 - The How Do You Eat Yours campaign hits TV
1994 - The Spitting Image puppets are roped in to help advertise the product
1997 - Matt Lucas declaims, "I've seen the future and it's egg-shaped"
2008 - Here Today Goo Tomorrow
2011 - Goo Dares Wins to tie in with the Olympics.

According to website Pimp That Snack, you can make a giant Cadbury's Creme Egg. Have a look first at PimpMySnack for some interesting letters on how they had to register their trademark.

http://www.pimpmysnack.com/

The Creme de la Creme Egg:
http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project/302/