Easter Candy

I want to share a collection of Easter time memories of candy that still rattle around in my head. The first is a story told to me, my wife Cindy, and to my kids by Cindy’s father Elmer “Bud” Morrison. When he was a child at Easter, he would break off the ears of his sisters chocolate rabbits and eat them. He would do it before going to church on Easter morning. To protect his bunny from any retaliatory strikes by his sisters he would hide his chocolate rabbit. One year he decided to hide his candy rabbit on a window sill behind the curtains. He felt that his chocolate treasure would be safe there. When he returned home and decided to fetch it, he found that it had disappeared with only several brown streaks that dripped from the window sill and ran down the wall. The sun had come out, shined in the window, and melted Bud’s poor little rabbit.

My aunt Violet Miner Bottomley would make chocolate covered Easter eggs every year for Easter. She made several flavors in several sizes. She would give me and my brother Ken a smaller one. I can’t remember if my sister Kathy was old enough or even born yet. The flavors she made were maple nut, fruit and nut, and coconut. My favorite was the coconut egg with its mild, sweet flavor wrapped in chocolate. The fruit and nut egg had a strong sherry flavor and reminded me of a fruit cake. The maple nut egg was overly sweet and tasted too strongly of maple.

When our church maintained a Christian school, the women of the church would make and sell peanut butter eggs as a fund raiser. They would blend together a concoction of margarine, powdered sugar, and peanut butter. The thickened mixture was shaped into elongated oval balls and cooled in large coolers. Later those balls were hand dipped and coated in melted chocolate and again refrigerated. Once the chocolate had hardened, the eggs were wrapped in pastel-colored squares of aluminum foil and sold. Most times the preorders for the tasty eggs kept us busy making them by the hundreds. They also made chocolate covered pretzel rods.

Cindy and I would buy smaller amounts of candy for the Easter baskets, preferring to add a book or some toy item. We did buy some of the peanut butter eggs, but rationed them out. The kids didn’t need all the sugar to wind them up at once and they could enjoy the book or toy after the candy was gone.