Saturday, April 3, 2021

Easter Candies I Wouldn't Eat Even If I Did (Which I Don't)

 Yesterday on "Good Mythical Morning," Rhett and Link did a bracket to determine the worst kind of Easter candy.

Here's the episode:


I'm a huge fan of "GMM," especially the earlier shows when Link looked like his mom still gave him money to get a haircut once a month and he spent $10 to go to Fantastic Sam's and spent the rest on White Claw. Mostly whenever I need to remind myself that all Millennials aren't wannabe hipsters who drink Starbucks six times a week bur can't save up the down payment on a house, I watch these two 40-something dorks who make six figures annually by filming themselves putting Transformers in battery acid to see what happens.

Seriously, though, I love these guys. GMM marathons helped me get through the loneliest days of pandemic lockdown with my sanity battered but intact

Anyway, the topic at hand yesterday was Easter candy, and the boys determined that these are the absolutely worst things you can inflict on an Easter basket.


Nowadays these apparently are known as "Brach's Easter Hunt Eggs" or "Hiding Eggs." They're also described as a "candy-coated marshmallow." These monikers are total nonsense. When I was a kid, these things didn't even have a name. And they are not now, nor have they ever been, marshmallows. 

Basically, these "eggs" are pure sugar, compressed to a consistency that, whatever the candymaker's intention, come off as having gone stale about 12 hours before you put them in your mouth. They're coated in sugar of an even harder texture - if you squeeze one lightly, the coating will crack into jagged shards of incipient tooth decay. And the different colors (all the colors of the rainbow, if the rainbow developed a drug habit) supposedly had different flavors...? More nonsense. Purple sugar tastes like pink sugar tastes like fluorescent green sugar.

In a nutshell, "Hiding Eggs" are the Easter candy you eat after you decide that Pixy Stix aren't an efficient enough vehicle for delivering uncut sucrose into your system.

Now, I don't necessarily disagree with their being crowned the worst Easter candy. But I will say that Rhett and Link's bad-candy bracket was flawed from the outset. I think they said that GMM viewers voted on the candies to be included.  I'm usually three or four minutes deep into an episode before I actually start paying attention, mostly because I'm focusing on whether I love or hate what they're wearing that day. Anyway, whoever voted for some of the contenders were bad actors and definitely should not be given water the next time they line up to cast their ballot.

Aside: Seriously, Georgia, WTF is wrong with you?

One of the most problematic inclusions in the bad-candy bracket is the Cadbury Creme Egg. Look, I am a reformed sugar fiend (and as an aside, I can't believe that it's been more than seven years and my sweet tooth NEVER returned), so it's been a few years since I routinely sampled new releases of candy and other sweet treats. But the Cadbury Creme Egg is a Hall of Fame candy, period. 


With an annual commercial right up there
with the jingling Hershey's Kisses at Christmas.

These first came out in America when I was a kid, and one egg cost as much as a whole candy bar, but biting off the tip and sticking your tongue in that sticky white creamy goodness was totally worth it. And until I wrote that sentence, I didn't realize how closely the experience bordered on sexual awakening, but that undoubtedly was part of the appeal even to an ignorant 10-year-old naif like myself.

Ahem.

To me, the Cadbury Creme Egg has no place in any ranking of worst Easter candy, as it is clearly the second-best Easter candy of all time, right behind the Reese's Pieces Carrot.

Is there a Nobel Prize for 
candy packaging?

Items that would make my personal bracket for leave-it-in-the-basket-or-hope-your-siblings-are-willing-to-trade candy include the following.

Palmer Chocolate Eggs


Obviously, it's not an Easter basket without a pile of these shiny bits of extraordinarily cheap chocolate. I would go so far as to say that the R.M. Palmer Company gave me a permanently skewed opinion of what holiday chocolate should taste like. Who knew that in some parts of the world chocolate is actually supposed to be flavorful and even sophisticated? These things are truly terrible, and the crunchy version filled with semi-stale crisped rice may actually be a little bit worse.

Russell Stover Maple Cream Egg


These were the most tradable of all Easter basket candies. The Easter Bunny would poop out an assortment (or buy them at Walgreen's, whatever), and each kid in the house got a few different varieties, and you would wheel and deal like a Boomer at a swap meet to get your favorites while unloading the ones you hated. There are so many delightful flavors of Russell Stover Cream Eggs - vanilla, coconut, the coveted raspberry. But it seems I always ended up with maple - the "I got a rock" of Easter candy. 

One Chuck to another, I feel you.

Disclaimer: I hate most things that are maple-flavored, so this is purely subjective on my part. However, if you disagree, you're wrong and I hope you get nothing but Palmer chocolate in your Easter basket and Christmas stocking this year.

Black Jelly Beans



Who is the fiend who would eat even one of these, let alone buy an entire bag of them? For that matter, who is the utter psychopath at Brach's who decided the world needed a bag of isolated licorice-flavored jelly beans? GMM did include Brach's jelly beans - or jelly bird eggs, as literally no one in history has ever called them - in their bad-candy bracket. I support this entry. Jelly beans are wonderful, but Brach's jelly beans are the bottom of the barrel. Except for the white ones with pink speckles, which maybe weren't even Brach's but who knows? Again, these putatively have different flavors that go with their colors, but apart from the disgusting taste of black licorice, no one can tell. And God forbid some well-meaning relative added spiced jelly beans to the mix. Spiced candy was invented by Communists to turn Western youth into goose-stepping automatons, and you can't make me believe otherwise. But even they were preferable to black jelly beans, which were always, always the very last thing left at the bottom of my basket a week after Easter.

Reese's White Peanut Butter Egg



Chocolate and peanut butter is the finest, purest flavor combination in the world. Don't go replacing half of it with a gaggingly sweet coating that can legally only be called "white." These can go fuck right off. 

M&Ms



Don't get me wrong: M&Ms are great. They melt in your goddam mouth, after all. Nowadays they even come in Easter-ready pastels. But that's just a disguise to fool unsuspecting children into thinking that M&Ms are remotely an Easter candy. This is a con the brand began to perpetuate in the 1980s with its "Thank you, Easter Bunny" commercials.

Bawk bawk, my ass.

I have to tell you, as the parent of a young child even I was guilty of filling plastic eggs with a handful of M&Ms and hiding them around the house. You know, something to break the monotony of eggs filled with jelly beans or spare change. 

Aside: Do little kids still get excited to find a quarter in a plastic egg? Or are they just expecting the Easter Bunny to Venmo them funds these days?

In any event, M&Ms as an Easter candy are a cop-out. A pure canard, as Wilford Brimley said in The Natural. Easter candy should take the form of something justifiably spring-themed like a chick or an egg or a bunny, and ideally should be something you can't just walk into Target and buy in a five-pound bag every freaking day of the year. Them's the rules that I just now made up for this post.

 Those, then, are my choices for worst Easter candy. Your mileage may vary. But as always, a) you're entitled to your opinion and b) you must be out of your goddamn mind.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate the holiday in either the dead-savior or cheap-chocolate format. 

P.S. I now think the white-with-pink-speckles variety of jelly bean was definitely a brand other than Brach's, but I don't remember it and can't find it online. I'm pretty sure it also began with a B, though. Any ideas?

2 comments:

  1. Nope to the Cadbury Egg - for me, that is one of the worst candies. My winner for the best Easter candy would be the Reese's Peanut Butter Egg hands down.

    I think, if I'm remembering correctly, Brach's DID have a line of speckled jelly beans. I just checked. Yes, they did.

    https://www.candywarehouse.com/brachs-fruit-fusion-speckled-jelly-beans-13-ounce-bag#:~:text=Discover%20the%20delicious%20flavor%20combinations,very%20tiny%20birds.

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  2. Oh, see - I LOVE the Maple Cream eggs from Russell Stover. It's a little bit of a sickness. The hiding eggs are nasty, I agree.

    For me, the joy of Easter candy is getting things I wouldn't normally have access to the other 11 months of the year - so while I applaud the execution of Reese's Carrot, the actual candy is just...Reese's. That doesn't apply to the Reese's Egg, Snickers Egg, et. al., because the composition is entirely different.

    Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for Robin's Eggs (malted milk balls) and Cadbury Mini-Eggs (especially since they now also come in dark chocolate). And Peeps. Basically, I like most of it. I do love the occasionally jelly bean, and I appreciate the nostalgia of chocolate covered marshmallow eggs.

    Sugar. Basically, I like sugar.

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