Admit it: Creme Eggs are vile

Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could have bought at any old corner shop. In 2019, a mega-fan from Liverpool had a Creme Egg tattooed on her hip.

I have never understood the love for something so mediocre. Creme Eggs are a cheerless chocolate. What I find perplexing is why anyone would find a confectionary that resembles the albumen and yolk of a soft-boiled egg appealing. (Although a friend assures me that the 1970s ‘Border’ version, which came in a natty tartan wrapping and swapped out the usual filling for chocolate fondant, was actually rather good.)

You’d think a glance at a Creme Egg’s ingredients would be enough to put people off, but apparently not. Each 40g ‘egg’ includes 26g of sugar as well as something called invert sugar syrup, made from an unholy mix of monosaccharide glucose and fructose – 1.3 times sweeter than regular sugar.

Further down the list you’ll find two kinds of vegetable fat, palm and shea (isn’t that what they use in soap?) as well as a malicious dash of emulsifier (E442) and some actual dried egg white for token authenticity. Paprika extract gives the ‘yolk’ its orange fluorescent glow. It’s almost impressive that, despite all these additives, Creme Eggs remain utterly tasteless apart from the cloying sting of industrial sweetener. 

But whatever you might think of Cadbury’s invention, its advertising campaigns have been inspired. In 1980 TV viewers were treated to a witty reinterpretation of Noël Coward’s Let’s Do It, performed by a spot-on Coward impersonator complete with rolling ‘r’s. The song included such peachy lines as ‘The upper class break their ranks for them/ They’d even break their piggy banks for them’ and ‘Shy debutantes in a trance love them, puts them under a spell/ One tiny glance at them brings them out of their shell’. All nonsense of course – in the early 1980s your average stick-thin Sloane wouldn’t have been seen dead eating something as non-U as a Creme Egg. But the catchy jingle helped lodge the eggs in people’s brains whether they liked it or not.

An amusingly brutal 2009 campaign named ‘Here Today, Goo Tomorrow’ featured a series of stop motion eggs being cruelly dispatched by various household objects including a pedal bin, meat tenderiser and circular saw.

Cadbury’s most memorable tagline was ‘How do you eat yours?’, the assumption being that we each have a unique way of consuming Creme Eggs rather than just stuffing them in our gobs. In one of the ads, a young girl clutching what looks like a cat tells us she likes to ‘wolf’ hers down while a mad-looking dentist prefers to ‘extract the filling’. Other eating methods included ‘with a spoon’, ‘on toast’ and ‘nibbling’. Cadbury resurrected the somewhat lewd tagline last year, suggesting that the way we eat Creme Eggs reveals a lot about our personality. I guess stamping on them in disgust makes me a monster.    

Are Creme Eggs disgusting or delicious? James joins with The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan on the latest Edition podcast: