Cake Hour Cackle: The Easter Bunny Returns

Easter is Sunday! For those who are religious and Christian it is the day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To a lot of kids and heathens, maybe, it is the day a bunny supposedly stops by and drops off a load of candy. Religion aside it is more appropriate to cake hour to bring an Easter basket full of sweets courtesy of the Easter Bunny. That's what happened today even though it is Good Friday which of course is the day that Jesus Christ was crucified. No disrespect intended, we just ain't around on Sunday.

Look what the Easter Bunny brought!

The obligatory bunnies and Peeps!

White exterior for the milk chocolate!

And the dark wrapping for...you guessed it!

Lots of Easter Candy classics!

Quite a selection embedded in the grass!

Thrilled with their Easter selection.

Can we dig in yet?

The basket was a very good size this year. It was chock full of a lot of things including many of the favorites that we have become accustomed to. These included: the obligatory chocolate bunnies this year courtesy of Dove Chocolate. Robin's Eggs which are candy and chocolate coated malted milk egg-shaped candy. As you can see from the picture they can leave you with a very respectable blue tongue.

The complete offering!

Broken down into it's individual components.

Malted Milk Robin eggs.

The color comes off to say the least!

The addictive Cadbury Mini Eggs which are infinitely superior to the Cadbury Creme Eggs were in the basket. M&M Easter edition candies including the peanut kind and the peanut butter filled version. These had some very nice colors including dark teal and lavender that we liked very much. There were also some Reese's Mini Peanut Butter Cups.

Can you pick out each of the various treats?

Furthermore we had Dove Chocolate eggs in four flavors - white, milk and dark chocolate and cocoanut cream. Hershey's Chocolate Eggs were included as were the obligatory jelly beans from Brachs. And last but not least we found the all too familiar and sometimes disconcerting Peeps.
Why are Peeps disconcerting? For some folks it is due to nutrition issues in that they are mostly pure sugar. For others it is the radioactive looking colors that are used to color the exterior of sugar. Nobody would ever make the case that these are "natural" coloring. We noticed a few of them had the eyes in the wrong place. On one of the blue ones it was unclear whether they were eyes or nipples. Peeps used to especially disturb one of our former graduated students. Look who they reacted when they came across a picture or her.

Yellow Peeps are classic!

Cyan Blue and Purple are hanging around!

Add it some green and magenta and all we are missing is orange!

Eyes at chest level!

Eyes in the back of Peep's head!

The Peeps are missing someone!

Disconcerting or not majority of us that are more than happy to partake and get in the Easter spirit.
We thought the Easter basket was very diverse this year. There was a milk chocolate bunny in a white wrapping and a dark chocolate bunny in a dark wrapping. A little bunny affirmative action so to speak. We also had an entire rainbow of peeps which fits in nicely with the whole inclusive and gay marriage thing that seems to be all over the place right now thanks to the Supreme Court and that red equal sign that is all over Facebook. From above the basket definitely brought to mind the rainbow flag. Well, sort of!

Affirmative action chocolate bunnies!

Rainbow Peeps for inclusivity!

The whole business made us think to the origins of the Easter Bunny. So we googled it. It turns out the tradition comes from - where else - the Germans. The Easter Bunny or Easter Hare originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behaviour at the start of the season of Eastertide. According to Wikipedia in legend, the creature carries colored eggs in his basket, candy and sometimes also toys to the homes of children, and as such shows similarities to Santa Claus, as they both bring gifts to children on the night before their respective holiday. The German Lutheran custom was first mentioned in Georg Franck von Frankenau's De ovis paschalibus (About Easter Eggs) in 1682 referring to an Alsace tradition of an Easter Hare bringing Easter Eggs. I could go on to elaborate on the Easter Eggs or supposedly how the hare, believed to be hemaprhoditic, came to be associated with the Virgin Mary but I'll just leave it here. The role of the egg in the whole Easter business I will also leave for another time.