EASTER CANDY

One of the happier memories of growing up was finding a basket full of candy hidden somewhere in the house Easters when I was very young. Then I got older, got acne, and my mom messed with the content, loading it with WHITE chocolate, sugar free crap and bad tasting junk.

They say smell is a powerful associative memory trigger, and I believe it. I can still imagine the smell of the green plastic Easter "grass" which would become infused with the smell of milk chocolate.

Settled, for me: dark chocolate: too bitter. Yuk, poo. Milk chocolate: just right!

That Easter grass would hide embedded treats for long spells.

Old Easter candy retained its inherent goodness. Some improved with age: Peeps, for instance.

Jelly beans should be spicy. Exemption: licorice. Fruit flavors should be avoided at all costs. Jelly Bellies are not Easter candy. They are perversions created by chemists who can make anything taste like anything. Hey, here's a neat red 5-L-butyloxyanaline!!!

Malted milk works. Half a bag is the gonna-be-sick threshold.

Speckled eggs usually good.

Rabbits should emphatically NOT be hollow.

Large egg should be coconut cream, and ideally not too creamy - gimme the texture of coconut. This is one case where dark chocolate may be permitted, to cut the sweetness of the egg, but I prefer milk choc.

Cadberry (sp?) eggs with cream filling are way too gooey and have a bland taste. Cadberry has a whole range of not-really-traditional Easter egg fillings. Shame!

I still like the colors of the hard boiled eggs, but let's not pretend - if it isn't candy, it has no place in the basket!

Today, in the real world, the Easter Grass will trigger the War On Drugs task force, the economy will only permit one egg, small, FDA inspection-ignored. And the easter Bunny is stranded jobless in Dubai.