Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/11/making-cadbury-creme-eggs-from.html
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There’s, of course, different points to start when you make something “from scratch”:
- Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
- Or you start with cocoa plants, sugar beets or canes, cows &c.
- Or you buy cocoa, sugar, milk &c. in a store.
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You beat me to it by seconds.
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Sorry, but I got totally distracted by the chef’s hair. Can someone with more knowledge comment on whether the silvery front is dyed or natural. Seems too cool to be natural 
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It’s believed to be natural. She has said that in college she started getting gray streaks she was dying it but “It was part of this thing around the 2016 election where I felt like I had better things to do than trying to hide my hair color.”
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Would you settle for “Artisanal Cadbury creme eggs”?
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The only problem I have with this video series - which I am totally fascinated by - is that often she spends a huge amount of effort slavishly recreating something that could be improved upon, since it’s not being mass produced out of the cheapest ingredients. Thankfully she didn’t do that here, as Cadbury Eggs are pretty gross, really. (I mean, I liked them as a kid, but they’re just poor quality chocolate and various kinds of sugar.)
What’s interesting is that there’s often, when recreating something that’s mass produced by machines, is that making them by hand requires an enormous amount of labor. (Beyond the extra labor involved in devising the recipe at the same time as making it.) It sometimes becomes difficult to replicate the consistency and qualities of the product when making it by hand, even for things that seem like they’d be fairly straightforward.
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When I was a kid, at breakfast, I’d add some sugar to my cereal. I’d grab a tablespoon and add a scoop or two of sugar. I did this even if the cereal was fairly sugar-laden out-of-the-box.
But before breakfast, I’d sneak into the kitchen and eat whatever sugary treat I could find. If there were Moon Pies or chocolate-covered graham crackers or Little Debbies (etc.) in the pantry, I’d nab one and sneak into the basement to eat it. One time I was almost busted, my dad passed me in the foyer so I crammed the whole treat in my mouth as I dashed into the basement, and no one was the wiser. When my mom went looking for the treats to serve up a snack, of course it came up empty or seriously depleted. She’d announce her surprise that the treats were gone, and who got into them? Of course, no one knew. 
It got to a point that if there were no treats, I’d just pull a chunk of dried brown sugar out of its container and eat that. Finally, before my younger sister’s birthday, there was a can of strawberry cake frosting. I got into that and ate a spoon or two every morning. When it came time for Mom to ice the cake, of course there wasn’t enough. “Who opened the frosting!? Where did it go?!” My parents assembled the three of us kids and interrogated us one by one. Dad lectured us about Richard Nixon, and to look what happened to him when he lied. I pinned the blame on my youngest sister, who was two. They bought it (or acted like they did). (Twenty or thirty years later I 'fessed up but no one else really even remembered the event like I had.)
My point in all this is to demonstrate that I believe it can safely be said that I enjoy sweets. I’m sure you would all agree. Now, please keep that in mind as you give the following statement its appropriate weight:
Cadbury creme eggs are gross. They have too much sugar; they’re too sweet and don’t taste good. Even in my hypersweetened youth I didn’t like them.
(Now the Cadbury mini-eggs, those are fine OK and I’ll gladly take a handful or three two. EDIT: I confused those with Whoppers robins’ eggs, which are fine.)
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The entire Bon Appétit channel is a pro-click. At the moment the chefs are still giving cooking shows from their various home kitchens with their pets and children charging through occasionally and it’s the best.
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That’s exactly what I came here to say. When I was a kid, what I loved about them was the re-creation of an egg in pure sugar form. I came to dislike them so much that I’ve probably let more Cadbury eggs dehydrate in a forgotten basket than I’ve actually eaten (dehydrate is not exactly right, but left a year or two, a Cadbury egg will turn white with fat bloom on the outside while the “eggy” center condenses into something like marzipan without the almonds).
I still loved the ads with the MGM lion wearing bunny ears and twitching his nose like rabbit instead of roaring obnoxiously. For better or for worse, I’m pretty sure this would never have existed if not for the stupid creme egg thing…
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Here’s my problem. No one involved liked the original product. And to make it worse no one involved knew of the terrible changes to the recipe made when Hershey’s bought the rights to manufacture it in the US. So no one knew what it should taste like.
Additionally her process was so overdone, from using real egg shells to creating a variant of the filling that looked like scrambled eggs. No one who enjoyed Cadbury wants an egg with a harder filling. When we got those as a kid we knew the egg was old and stale
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Here’s a video from 4 years ago to compare. The format has loosened up since then
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Same exact thing happened to my sister. We’ve got a genetic predisposition to early graying (thanks Dad…), and while I got evenly spaced salt and pepper, she got the Cruella deVille streak. Same place as Claire’s.
Also, when cooking new things, Claire is clearly my spirit animal.
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Thanks!
Now that I know what to google, I am apparently not the only one wondering about it
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Funny. She looks younger by far in the more recent videos…
I remember seeing a package of Grandma’s-brand (i.e. Frito-Lay) sandwich cookies (i.e. mini-Oreo copies) in a vending machine at work. I wrote Frito-Lay a faux letter, Ted L. Nancy-style, asking why they called them “Grandma’s” as in my life I’d never heard of anyone (grandmother or otherwise) making Oreo-type cookies at home (this was before I learned about whoopie pies, which aren’t the same anyway). They sent me a letter saying that sorry, the recipe is proprietary and they can’t explain. They did enclose a coupon for a free package (which I never used). When I told some co-workers about it, one of them went off about how it’s absolutely possible to make sandwich cookies at home, and they should call them “Grandma’s” because his grandmother made them, herself… I’m certain it’s “possible” but I didn’t believe him.
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Claire is wonderful. I especially love it when a thought takes here somewhere. It’s obvious she’s no longer in the room with the other BA staff.
Agreed, but I also spent much time and effort trying to recreate Hostess Cupcakes 20 or 25 years ago, when checking the Internet for copycat recipes wasn’t an option. I ended up with a not-a-copy-at-all filled cupcake, which was delicious but not the original article, so technically a fail. We also almost bought a Twinkie pan before I vetoed the idea, because the idea of eating mountains of not-quite-there sponge cake didn’t sound as fun as the eating of mountains of chocolate cupcakes actually was.
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Sandwich cookies are extremely doable compared to some of the stuff she’s made, where she was trying to replicate precisely extruded/machine cut items by hand that then had to go through further elaborate processes; something that in the factory was obviously achieving with simple machines.
You can make sandwich cookies pretty easily with a rolled cookie recipe, easily shaped with a simple cookie cutter or stamp if you want consistency, and then two cookies are jammed together around a dollop of filling, which usually, for commercial cookies, is the equivalent of very simple frosting (i.e. fat mixed with powdered sugar). When Claire did faux-Oreos, it was the easiest thing she did, and she was being obsessive about recreating the fine details of the commercial cookie (using the stamp design, cutting out precise disks of filling rather than just squashing them together, etc.). They looked identical to the commercial product, but used a superior recipe.
Something like that, it’s all about finding a recipe you’re happy with. I was just watching her Twinkie episode, where the tricky bit was deciding on a cake recipe that worked for that purpose, and she was only trying to create a filled sponge cake, not slavishly replicate the Twinkie (which she threw away with relish) and was starting out with the knowledge of a pastry chef.
On the other hand, the instant ramen episode was all about slavishly recreating elements that are artifacts of the industrial process, e.g. the wavy bricks of dried ramen, not to mention the fundamental absurdity of creating instant ramen rather than just ramen…
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