As we discovered in our recent review of Popping Mini Eggs, Cadbury seems willing to go to some pretty darn strange places in order to “improve” a candy that many would argue is already the pinnacle of Easter candy perfection. I like to imagine the conversation went kind of like this:

Cadbury Executive 1: Yeah, Mini Eggs are pretty darn popular.

Cadbury Executive 2: No kidding – they’re our top-selling Easter candy. But you know what’s wrong with them?

Cadbury Executive 1: No, Bob – what’s wrong with them?

Cadbury Executive 2: They’re just not MINI enough!

Cadbury Executive 1: By George… I think you’re on to something!

And thus, Micro Mini Eggs were born.

Unsurprisingly, they look just like mini versions of the regular ones, with their pale pastel colors speckled with brown. (In the picture below, the bigger eggs are regular-sized Popping Eggs.) However, they do only come in four colors – purple, yellow, blue and white. If you want to believe the bag, Purple is the chick, Blue’s the cool dude, and Yellow’s a dead ringer for my Aunt Marge. Maybe White’s the pasty nerd who never leaves his basement, thus explaining why he didn’t show up for the photo shoot.

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candy images in this post courtesy of Anthemic Tangle
Every Easter I get kind of dazed by the sheer multitude of chocolate Easter bunnies beckoning to me from the store shelves. They’re all pretty and shiny, and I can hear them calling, “Pick me! Pick me!” But which one to choose?

Well, this year I embarked on the Bite A Bunny experiment. I did a taste test to decide, once and for all, what the best bunny choices are. So I didn’t get totally overwhelmed by the bountiful bunnies, I had some simple rules: stick to milk chocolate, go for hollow bunnies where possible, and only choose bunnies that are readily available to the average shopper. I came up with seven contestants. All bunnies were hollow, except where noted.

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Now, some people might say that Mini Eggs are perfect just the way they are – tiny, sugary ovoids of chocolaty perfection. To those people I say, BLASPHEMY! There is no candy so perfect that marketing executives can’t tweak with the formula to produce a bunch of special editions that nobody really needed, but all of us Candy Addicts are going to snap up by the handfuls anyway. Not that I’m bitter – this is the mindset that gave us Dark Chocolate Mini Eggs, after all. But after you’ve made a perfect candy even MORE perfect with dark chocolate, where do you go from there?

If you’re Cadbury, that place might just involve Pop Rocks – and lots of ‘em.

To a certified Candy Addict, a big bag of Mini Eggs is about as fun as it gets anyway – but kids today have short attention spans, I guess. Hence, the creation of Mini Eggs that literally explode in your mouth.

As far as I could see, these come only in the smallest, single serving-size bag – which, at 32 grams, feels a lot lighter than I remember from previous years. However, the regular and dark Mini Eggs also come in this bag size, so at least everyone’s getting stiffed equally, I guess? The eggs themselves look a little different than regular Mini Eggs – their color’s more intense, and they’re missing those distinctive brown speckles.

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There’s a definite trend right now towards small but rich chocolate candies that are packaged to appeal to women and marketed as little indulgences that won’t break your diet. Cadbury has officially entered the arena with Moments, which are essentially two-bite truffles in bar form. With Moments, Cadbury seems to be aiming for the same upscale demographic as Dove and Hershey’s Bliss. And like Dove and Bliss, they don’t come cheap – I paid $3.50 CAN for the pack. That’ll buy you a bar from some pretty upscale chocolate companies. So how does this higher-end product from a lower-end candy company stand up?

First, the specs: Moments consist of little sticks about the size of a fun-sized Kit Kat, tucked into a cardboard “envelope” that opens from one long side, like a box of cigarettes. (Hmm, somehow I doubt that’s what Cadbury was going for with this product.) Each stick has only 70 calories, which puts it well within range of that whole 100 calorie thing that’s so big right now.

Of the three flavors on the store shelf, I selected Deliciously Dark, the other two being milk chocolate and praline (the hazelnut kind, not the toffee kind.) Under the wrapper, the bars consist of two little segments, attached end to end, and they sure don’t look very dark to me – it seems that only the truffle filling is dark chocolate, which was kind of a letdown to a dark chocolate junkie like myself.

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From the folks at Ricolino, who brought you the fun-to-say Bubu Lubu candy bar, comes Chutazo! Chocolate soccer balls filled with “eggnog” flavored goo.

Chutazos are the sporty cousins of Cadbury Eggs with less of the immediate cavity-inducing filling. The Chutazo goo is paltry compared to the Cadbury version, and closer to the color of an egg yolk rather than the contents of a child’s snot-filled Kleenex. If you close your eyes tightly enough the Chutazo filling does taste vaguely of eggnog, with a sustained almond note. Not bad, actually, once you get past the cheap-o chocolate.

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