The overpriced Easter egg report

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It’s almost Easter, so let’s check in on the most absurdly expensive Easter eggs I could find online. I do this every year. I still haven’t figured out why.

Low end? An extra-thick dark chocolate egg filled with individual truffles. They’re made with gin, wine, rum, and–

No, sorry. I was going to write opiates, but they’re not listed. My mistake. 

Putting filled chocolates, or in this case, truffles, inside an egg is a British thing at this time of year. I never saw that done in the U.S. So there’s your vague gesture in the direction of intercultural education.

That’s from Hotel Chocolat for £29. With that, you get five paragraphs of prose, a generous side of adjectives, and a warning that the truffles aren’t for children. 

Marginally relevant photo: This is your Easter periwinkle. If you don’t celebrate Easter, don’t worry about it–I don’t either. As far as I know, it’s not an Easter flower.

 

Yeah, but surely we can waste more money than that 

Hotel Chocolat also has a £55 two-tier box of chocolates. It’s not actually an egg, but why should we follow the rules when I’m the one who made them? Since it’s expensive enough to be called a cabinet, not a box, it fits right in here. 

Yeah, it looks like a box to me too. Shows you what we know. 

The money must’ve gone into the packaging here, because you only get four paragraphs of prose, and they’re shorter than the ones that come with the £29 egg.

Cheapskates.

At Fornum & Mason’s you can find a £45 milk chocolate egg that Glamour Magazine tells us is a work of art with a flawless shine and tercentenary-blend chocolate. A centenary or so back, I worked in a candy factory and I never once heard of a tercentenary blend. But then we weren’t making high-end chocolates. And they wouldn’t have told me what was going on anyway.

Each egg’s handcrafted to make sure it’s a little different from all the others. And every last one of them is better than all the others. They’re all guaranteed to rot your teeth. 

Enjoy.

Glamour also wedges in a Fortum & Mason’s spring hamper, which is cheating but the prices haven’t gotten absurd enough yet, so let’s go with it. It costs £125 and whoever wrote their article swears that Glamour readers are snapping up F & M hampers. 

Uh huh.

The hamper includes biscuits, which are cookies if you’re American, and–oh, other stuff, including a rosé sparkling tea that’s 0% ABV. That means alcohol by volume. Most tea is 0% alcohol by volume–it’s one reason you drink it to stay awake–but you don’t usually pay enough for that to be mentioned. 

On the other hand, most tea isn’t sparkling. Or rosé. 

No, I haven’t the faintest idea what the stuff is. But do you really care what’s in the hamper? It’s from Fortnum & Mason’s. It comes in a wicker basket that’s called a hamper because that’s how they do things over here.

Where I come from, the only thing we called a hamper was the whatsit we threw our dirty clothes in. We kept our cookies somewhere else. We’d have kept our tea somewhere else too but we didn’t drink tea.

And yes, of course I read Glamour Magazine. Once a year, just before Easter. They helped me develop the look you can admire in the photo at the top right of Notes’ home page.

 

Onward

For £80, you can get 200 grams of boring looking chocolate egg, in milk or dark, from Marchesi. Except for the price, this is minimalism–one paragraph of low-key prose, muted colors, and not much in the way of decoration on the egg itself. 

For reasons they don’t bother to explain, it’s called Girl, even though it’s pretty clearly not a girl but a chocolate egg.

You can also get one called Boy, which is not a boy any more than Girl is a girl. When I worked at the candy factory, no one ever talked about the chocolate having either a gender or a sex, but maybe we were missing the obvious.

If you go up to £85, you get 300 grams of gender-free chocolate. 

The Hotel de Crillon, which unlike Hotel Chocolat seems to be a real hotel, offers a chocolate egg with a car driving out of it.

Sorry, did I say a car? “The famous D.S, the Palace’s iconic car,” and it doesn’t drive out, it “seems to emerge.” Which sort of implies that it doesn’t really emerge, it just fools you into thinking it does while it’s actually still in bed. But you’ll have to spend £70 to find out for sure.

Spend £100 and you can buy a kilo–that’s 2.2 pounds–of milk chocolate and hazelnuts from Venchi. It comes with almost no prose, but the photos dance around a bit, whether you want them to or not.

 

Eggs we’ve probably missed out on

For £150, Harrod’s has an egg that as far as I can tell is mostly air. (Ever wonder why the rich are thin?) It’s made of anorexic slabs of chocolate finished with gold leaf and separated by layers of luxury air. They only made fifty, so we’ve probably missed our chance.

For £140, you can get a ceramic egg with ears from Harvey Nichols. It comes with truffles inside. Only thirty were made, so we’re probably too late, but I’ve got a £1 bag of chocolate eggs in the other room and I’d be happy to share. When I was working in the candy factory, I lost my taste for candy anyway.

 

And at the top of the obscenity scale

The most expensive egg comes from Choccywoccydoodah (I had to cut and paste that) and costs–yes indeed–£25,000. Or possibly £10,000. I’ve found both prices quoted. I put it down to journalists going comatose in the presence of high numbers, but really, at a certain point, who cares? So what if it all get a little murky when we get to the cash register?   

Each egg weighs 220 pounds, or 100 kilos, and wrecks my explanation of why the rich are thin. More to the point, each one also has an intricately detailed scene inside, featuring dragons, or ducks, or hares, or whatever. And each one takes three weeks to make. 

And then, presumably, some barbarian comes along and eats the thing. Or doesn’t eat it and you end up with cockroaches. 

How is it possible to sell a chocolate egg for that kind of money? Well, as it happen yesterday morning’s paper let me know that in 2020 one of the directors of a gambling website was paid £48,000 per hour for every hour of every day–working, sleeping, and otherwise–that could be scratched out of the year. 

That may explain why a very few people lose their sense of proportion.

66 thoughts on “The overpriced Easter egg report”

    • I just know there’s a pun in there that I can’t find, but that doesn’t help me find it, unfortunately. Putting that aside, though, I have no idea why this particular strand of cultural obscenity fascinates me, but it does. I’d decided not to do it this year and you see what happened.

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      • Our Easter falls on May 2 so there’s still time for that. It’s a tradition back home, so yes, I do it. Plus now it’s much more fun with the kid.
        The best results are when you dye eggs naturally with: onion skins (cook them some in water, the more you do so, the redder your eggs will be), cumin and/or curcuma for yellow/brown eggs, red cabbage for blue/purple eggs, beets for maroon/brown eggs and so on. The colors vary a lot depending on the egg color as well.

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  3. Just as I read about all these fancy easter eggs, I realise now that I never really got over the disappointment of discovering that chocolate easter eggs are hollow. As a child I thought that they were going to be solid chocolate all they way through!

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    • Oh, that would hurt. I seem to remember that in the US the tiny, foil-wrapped ones were solid. Easter rabbits, though, were hollow. (In spite of not being Christian, we celebrated Easter. I think my mother couldn’t resist the lure of putting Easter baskets together.)

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      • Easter has very pagan roots…think of all those bunnies and eggs…it’s all about fertility and renewal. The Christians just took over the festival and rebranded it. They did that with just about very pagan festival they could find. I like the sense of connection with people through the mists of time (regardless of what they “believed”) I like that sense of community with the past.

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        • I can understand feeling that way but never thought it meant much to me until a family in the village had a memorial that involved people meeting, walking across some fields to the cliffs, and pouring the ashes into the sea from the clifftop. I looked back at about the halfway point and thought, This could be two hundred years ago. It could be two thousand years ago. There was something ancient and timeless about it. As you said, never mind what beliefs underlay it, it was incredibly moving.

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  5. My boss gets given a huge box of Hotel Chocolate chocs every Christmas, I presume they’re kind of the same. Chocolate gives her migraines so she passes them on to me. They’re very nice so am happy to have them for free, but I wouldn’t spend that much myself.

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  6. When I see stuff like this, I always equate it with what I could buy with that money. You know, things like: an entire bookstore’s worth of books, a house (at least here in Kansas, U.S.), start up a no-kill animal rescue shelter, buy some swampland to protect it from developers. What would you do? (And, a candy factory? Interesting…)

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  10. Although I totally agree money could be spent in a much better way than on these obscenely priced Easter eggs, your post has given me a good laugh. I particularly like the heading “Eggs we’ve probably missed out on.” Well, we haven’t now, have we? Apart from eating them of course, but my theory is these extremely posh Easter eggs are just casually strewn around (with the label showing prominently) and never actually consumed…..

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    • I don’t know which is worse, eating them or not eating them. But you remind me (although they were in a totally different price range) of the wax-covered chocolate bunnies that my mother gave me and my brother every Easter. My brother always ate his first chance he got. I always fell in love with mine and couldn’t eat it until the wax got full of gunk. I wouldn’t swear to this, but I have a hunch he ended up eating both of them–his on Easter, mine probably in June or July. But I may be making that last part up. Either way, I always get a perverse kick out of looking for the most outrageous eggs. Glad you got laugh out of them.

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  11. The Cadbury Creme Eggs at least have a filling. and are not a hollow shell. Just in case they are available as imports at a more reasonable price than they are in Thailand.
    I used to work in a pickle factory – where we packed them we didn’t make them, It took me a number of years to even try relish on a sandwich, let me tell you. But it also kept me in college . No matter how tedious higher education was, I knew damn well I did not want to spend the rest of my life packing pickles.

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  14. Extravagance feels wrong when so many people are out of work and struggling. I do love chocolate and Easter eggs. Hey, I’m a preschool teacher, a mom, and a grammy. Just give me a Cadbury egg, thank you.

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