Listen up, eggheads.
The Cadbury Creme Egg has been a mainstay of the Easter period for decades, popping up like clockwork every year, heralding in the chocolate season.
So when we learned what exactly gives the egg yolk its golden hue, we knew we had to share the news. As it turns out, the little yellow orb is made with fondant and paprika. Well, an extract made from paprika anyway.
Of course, you can’t actually taste any of that smoky capsicum flavour, but there’s no denying this is a refreshingly natural additive despite its slightly clinical name: colour (160C).
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The full ingredient list reads milk chocolate (53%), fondant centre (47%). ingredients: sugar, milk solids, wheat glucose syrup, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, invert sugar, vegetable oil, emulsifiers (442, soy lecithin), egg albumen, flavours, and colour (160C).
In a similar vein, products like processed cheese – and fancy gouda – are coloured by an extract of the annatto seed, giving them their signature orange tinge, and beetroot – E162 – is an ingredient in red M’n’Ms.
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Back to the egg side of things, paprika and other red-coloured vegetables are often fed to real chickens to enhance the shade of their egg yolks, giving a more premium look. Fortunately, chickens don’t have spice receptors so they can chow down on red hot chillis all day and not feel a thing.
As for Cadbury Creme Egg yolks, it’s unclear whether the paprika extract has always been used to colour the fondant but it appears to have survived the great Creme Egg recipe shake up of 2015 – likely dating back to at least 1963 when Cadbury bought original creators, J. S. Fry & Sons.
The more you know.
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