Easter is almost upon us. As the weeks get warmer and the flowers continue to bloom, prepare yourselves for a weekend of staining your hands with egg dye, getting scared by those creepy Easter Bunny costumes, listening to your little cousins complain about going to church, and, of course, some classic Easter candy.
What would Easter be without that little Easter basket filled with a wide variety of Easter candy? I say wide variety, but really, all these candies are just some variation of an egg or a bunny made out of chocolate and filled with some kind of cream. Easter may be the least creative holiday as far as candy is concerned. Nonetheless, egg and bunny-shaped candies are a defining aspect of the Easter experience. And you know what that means. It’s rank time.
Here is my ranking of the seven most famous Easter candies, based solely on personal opinions, subjective taste pallets, and my somewhat unreliable childhood memories. Peter Cottontail’s got nothing on me.
1. Cadbury Mini Chocolate Eggs
There’s a reason I’m literally eating these right now as I write this. Cadbury Mini Eggs are everything you could possibly want in a candy. Rich, smooth milk chocolate and a sugary shell with the perfect crunch. Cadbury has somehow perfected the eggshell texture using nothing but sugar and Easter Bunny magic. These little eggs are so addictive I could finish a whole bag in one sitting.
2. Chocolate Bunnies
This candy is literally just pure chocolate, which is what makes it so good. As a chocolate lover, nothing beats a giant portion of high-quality milk chocolate. As I kid, we always got the Lindt Gold bunnies, which gave you the fun of untying the red ribbon and peeling back the gold foil before biting the bunny’s head off (and if you’re not eating the ears first, you’re doing it wrong). Regardless of whether you prefer your bunnies hollow or solid on the inside, seeing those giant chocolate ears in your Easter basket is always a treat.
3. Chocolate-Covered Marshmallow Eggs
Chocolate and marshmallow are such a solid combination. There’s nothing more satisfying than biting through a crispy layer of dark chocolate to reach that chewy, gooey, fluffy marshmallow inside. My Easter basket usually only came with one of these, two if I was lucky, so I was sure to savor them.
4. Cadbury Creme Eggs
This is one of the most iconic Easter candies. However, it may get more praise than it deserves. Although Cadbury chocolate is delicious, the cream inside can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you get the ideally smooth, creamy, silky cream that pairs perfectly with the chocolate. However, sometimes the cream is too thick or pasty, and sometimes the egg is only half full. Additionally, these eggs are so so sugary. As a kid, that was a welcome treat, but now I find them overly sweet.
5. Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs
Reese’s are in fact my favorite candy of all time. Usually, I’m not super into peanut butter and chocolate together because I find the sweetness overpowering, but Reese’s has managed to perfect the ratios, making a candy that is perfectly balanced and satisfying every time. That being said, I put the Reese’s Eggs toward the bottom of this list because they are no different from a normal Reese’s cup. Sure, they look like an egg on the outside, but where is the internal creativity? They may be delicious, but they just don’t scream “Easter” the way the other candies do. I fear Reese’s may be eternally regulated to the realm of Halloween.
6. Jelly Beans
Jelly beans are nothing more than a filler candy. That means they fill the empty gaps within your Easter basket. Sure, they look cute and colorful, but flavor-wise, they deliver so little that you might as well just save your money and replace them with that paper grass. Some jelly bean flavors are better than others, but overall, they have an unpleasant gummy texture that gets caught in your teeth and an unwelcome chemical flavor.
7. Peeps
This is perhaps the most iconic Easter candy of all time, so it’s definitely a hot take to put them at the bottom of the list. I’m sorry, they’re just gross. They somehow took a perfectly normal marshmallow and made it worse. Something about that layer of straight granulated sugar in nuclear-level artificial colors is just off-putting. And they’re ugly too. The chick-shaped ones look less like a chick and more like a glob of goop. Also, Peeps have a reputation for being indestructible. A series of science experiments conducted by Emory University in 1999 found that they do not dissolve in water, acetone, high heat, or even sulfuric acid. Peeps also survived being dropped from five-story buildings and being crushed by a crane. I don’t want to know what chemicals are in Peeps to make them that indestructible, but I definitely don’t want them inside my body.