Dissolving edible candy grass

The Sea Turtle Conservancy reminds us that plastic Easter basket grass (left) lasts forever in the environment, often ending up in bird's nests and our waterways. BUt edible easter grass breaks down into starchy soupy water right away. No sea turtle danger here!

Bumpy Easter Eggs with Jordan Almonds

How did putting a purple Jordan almond in water turn it into a bumpy Easter egg?

Perhaps the bumpy spots resulted from bubbles sticking to the candy shell, preventing water from reaching and dissolving those particular spots.

Scrambled Easter Eggs?

When you microwave Black Forest Juicy Oozers Gummy Cracked Eggs, they melt into "scrambled eggs"!
Pink Juicy Oozer eggs, and a white "egg" that we've "scrambled"

The liquid centers melt faster than the harder gummy shell, probably because the center has a higher water content. It melted right through the gummy candy cover and "scrambled" the whole egg!

A Little Easter Bunny Carnage

I have been taking pictures of candy all day long--candy in oil, candy in water, candy out of water... Did you know it's REALLY hard to photograph glass?

Here's one that may or may not make the book.

Video showing how Cadbury eggs are made. Watch around minute 4 to see how two filled halves are stuck together to make one filled egg! (You can skip the first part of the video--there's a lot of hair nets and handwashing which, while I'll glad to learn they do, are not as interesting as the candy part.)

How Much Chocolate in a Chocolate Easter Bunny?

In the box, this chocolate Easter bunny looks like way more than a kid needs to eat. But, because it's hollow, this 1.75 oz bunny only contains as much chocolate as this set of snack-sized bars.

Easter Chocolate Pudding Chromatography

Mixing up some boxed chocolate pudding for my daughter's birthday party, I committed the same mistake as Matthew McConaughey in The Wedding Planner talking about brown M&M's--assuming that because it was chocolate, and that it was brown, that the brown color was all chocolate. (When we make chocolate pudding from scratch, with real chocolate, it's brown!) But a glance at the box told me otherwise--just like the coating on brown M&M's, Jell-O chocolate pudding has red, yellow, and blue food dye.


Naturally, I had to go looking for the dye. I wish I'd done the experiment before I mixed the pudding--diluting the pudding with milk made the colors harder to see. But I did get some color separation.
I don't know why I didn't see any blue. Maybe because the pudding was mixed with milk by the time I thought to test it, diluting the colors? Or maybe there just wasn't very much. There isn't much blue in M&M's.

We went ahead and used the chocolate pudding for my daughter's birthday party, turning "chocolate dirt pudding pots" with gummi worms and cookie crumbs into Easter egg hunting treats.

But my kids ended up not liking the pudding. Guess they're too used to the real thing.