Whether you eat a chocolate Easter bunny ears-first or feet-first, you don’t have to worry about the stores running out during Easter season, as more than 90 million are made each year, making them the most popular Easter candy available.
Like Halloween, Easter is a time to indulge your sweet tooth and enjoy your favorite candies, which are only available once a year. Discover the most popular Easter candy below.
Chocolate bunnies
Forever the centerpiece of Easter baskets, chocolate bunnies are either hollow or solid, covered in candy pieces or plain and come in dark or milk chocolate. They’re one of the cheapest options out there at less than a buck per bunny, but they’ve also gone gourmet from world-class chocolatiers.
Chocolate eggs
Whether they’re solid chocolate or filled with marshmallow, vanilla cream or peanut butter, chocolate eggs and Easter go together like fireworks and Independence Day. Favorites include Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs or any variety of “filler” chocolate eggs that always seem to get stuck in the fake grass in Easter baskets.
Cadbury Crème Eggs
Some find them disgusting-looking for their yellow “yolk” center, but Cadbury Crème Eggs followers find them delicious, snapping up 200 million of them in any given Eastern season. The thick milk chocolate shell envelopes a white and yellow fondant center designed to look like the inside of an egg, and though Cadbury has released multiple versions of its best-selling confection, the original remains the worldwide favorite.
Peeps
Gooey and marshmallow, sugar-coated Peeps were originally released in 1953 as yellow chicks available at Easter only, but since then, variations in multiple colors, shapes and flavors have wandered into stores on other major holidays as well. Americans buy more than 700 million of the Peeps, Bunnies and Eggs each year, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy. In 2012, they are available chocolate-covered.
Jelly beans
Though the jelly beans’ beginnings are muddled, its devotees are loyal, especially around Easter. Americans consume 16 million of them at Easter, and candy producer Jelly Belly makes more than 34 million pounds per year.
Robin’s Eggs
Really just Whoppers in an egg shape (in multiple, speckled colors), Robin’s Eggs have malted milk centers surrounded by a layer of milk chocolate and a candy shell. They were introduced between 1949 and 1952.
Cadbury Mini-Eggs
When described, “solid milk chocolate in a crisp candy shell” makes them sound a lot like M&Ms. But Cadbury’s sweeter, richer milk chocolate is what separates this candy from others. With more than 317,000 Facebook “likes,” Cadbury Mini-Eggs have a cult-like following that can only be satisfied during Easter and when a similar product is available at Christmas. They were first introduced in 1967