Easter is a religious holiday to celebrate the Resurrection. But there’s an evil part to the holiday, one that lurks on the store aisle dedicated to everything Easter – Mini Cadbury Eggs. These devilishly delicious treats are solid milk chocolate covered with a crispy sugar shell. And not cheap chocolate either. Mini Cadbury Eggs are rich, velvety chocolate with a just-right thin candy shell covering decadent chocolate, and they’re Easter’s answer to crack cocaine.  

          Sure there’s other Easter candy, and they all have their own merit. There’s jelly beans in every color and flavor. As kids, we seldom thought to wonder about the flavor of the jelly beans, but every once in a while, we’d eat one with our eyes closed and guess the flavor. Cherry or strawberry was easy – those were red. Lemon jelly beans were yellow and coconut or pineapple — two flavors we ignored when there were red strawberry jelly beans to inhale – were white. The licorice candies were immediately swapped out of my unsuspecting little brother’s basket for all his red and orange ones. Grape turned out to be, surprise, the purple ones, and orange was, well, orange. But the green ones were a mystery.

             We couldn’t think of a green fruit, so, to the Hebert siblings, green jelly beans tasted green, and that was the flavor we assigned to all green jelly beans.

              The Easter Bunny always included a chocolate bunny in our baskets, tucked into green plastic grass along with the Easter eggs we’d dyed the night before. Nestled in with the jelly beans were handfuls of M&Ms and assorted chocolate balls wrapped in colorful foil. Those chocolate balls always had a waxy taste, so I’d toss those into my unsuspecting sister’s basket while stealing her orange jelly beans. Not the green ones, though because those tasted, well, green.

               The Easter Bunny learned our preferences over the years and adjusted accordingly. My sister didn’t particularly like chocolate, so the bunny left her a white chocolate rabbit. I preferred peanut M&Ms over the plain M&Ms, so the Easter Bunny knew to dump more of those in my basket than my brother’s.

                 But no American Easter basket is complete without a package of iconic marshmallow Peeps tucked behind the chocolate bunny.  For those who’ve been living on a desert island, Peeps are a blob of marshmallow covered with bright yellow sugar in a shape that somewhat resembles a small chick. But they’re more than a replica of a cute Easter icon. Peeps are required in an American Easter basket, even if you don’t like them. But adore them people do.  One Website claims that 5.5 million Peeps are made every day, and they’re still hard to find on the shelves the closer we get to Easter Sunday.

                  Peeps originally came in bright yellow because they were supposed to resemble chicks. But modern candy lovers have a variety of colorful and creative Peeps to choose from, including coconut or blueberry Peeps dipped in chocolate, vanilla Peeps dipped in white fudge and there’s even a suggestion to pair strawberry Peeps with moscato rose wine for the grown-up Peeps connoisseur.

                   This year, there’s one variety of Peeps that could give my Mini Cadbury Eggs a run for their money – chocolate mousse Peeps dipped in creamy milk chocolate.

                    Here’s hoping the Easter Bunny drops both in my basket this year. That way, I can answer the age-old question – which came first – the Peeps chick or the Cadbury egg by eating every one of them the bunny leaves in my basket. Happy Easter!

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.