SGI: Easter digression
Easter, for me, means a very particular kind of Easter egg. They come in boxes of six, just like regular eggs, and they are white and egg-sized, and look very much as though you could scramble them, except as any fule kno they are of course simply milk chocolate eggs with a lovely hard white sugar coating. Well, as any South African fule kno, because you just don't get them in the UK; and since for any right thinking person they are the only proper Easter eggs there are, well, I've been in some distress every spring.
So naturally, when I saw, while strolling through Fiesole - a scenic and historic site in the hills above Florence - a basket of colourful eggs in the window of a confectioner's, I recognised that this must be the pastel-coloured equivalent of our lovely white eggs, and insisted that we had to buy a couple immediately. (Despite the absolutely shocking price of 2 euro apiece. Two! Euro! Apiece!) And so we strolled on, sucking assiduously. (Childish sucking is the only possible way of getting through the sugar shell without cracking a tooth. It's messy and inelegant and quite marvellous.)
"Mmmm," we said to each other. "This sugar coating definitely tastes right."
We sucked some more.
"Hmmm," we said to each other. "This sugar coating seems to be rather harder to crack than usual."
We sucked some more.
"Mmmm," we said to each other. "This dark chocolate is unusual. But very good. But why can't we bite through it yet?"
We sucked some more, increasing frequency of experimental biting attempts.
"Oh!" we said.
South African sugar eggs generally do not contain mini plastic eggs inside 'em. Also, the chocolate layer is a lot thinner.
The plastic eggs had something in 'em too.
The duckies liked the view from Fiesole. (So did we.)
2 comments:
I'm completely with you on the white candy eggs. And you can get them here! At least, you could the last time I looked. Since I've fallen down the Hotel Chocolat rabbit hole since then, I don't have any recent memory of seeing them, but I'm pretty certain Woolworths stocked them.
And don't you love the eggs-within-eggs thing they have going here? It's the first year I've noticed it, and suddenly I discover that most of my colleagues have never known any other kind of egg. "Hollow eggs!" they cried. "How absurd!" And there was I, never having had any other kind, looking rather foolish in my childish glee.
Funny how I can live in this country for five years and yet remain so ignorant. I don't think I have ever darkened the door of a Woolworths - not through snobbery (well, not only that), but because there haven't been any near me, and/or I've never needed to.
And while I have noticed the eggs-within-eggs before (like Kinder eggs, which I'd encountered in SA), I definitely hadn't realised they were so standard - hence the surprise in Italy. No hollow eggs here? *Fascinating*.
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