How to perfectly organize your Easter basket

CharacteristicsTakeout stories about food, drinks and our way of life.

Easter is April 21 (April 28 for Greeks), which means that you only have a few days left to make important decisions for you and your family. Do you want to dress with a seasonal touch? Will you brave brunch crowds in the streets of your city? And more importantly, what will the Easter baskets of your family expect to surprise and delight everyone who receives one?

Easter baskets look like floral arrangements or charcuterie boards: wonderful anyway, but very special when they have been carefully arranged. Ensuring that all the elements are present and in harmony with each other will increase the experience. Like deli meats, it is a question of quality rather than quantity. You do not expect to have huge pieces of Iberian ham on your serving platter and you also do not want an entire bag of pastel wrapped Hershey miniatures carelessly placed on a clump of plastic turf.

So, even if you can not go wrong, here is a list for the most successful: the elements that make up the ideal Easter basket.

Of course, the rabbit

The crown jewel of any basket will be the rabbit, and it should be included, but it does not have to overwhelm other treats by its size or density. Dove makes a solid chocolate rabbit, covered with a gold leaf, which fits perfectly in a basket but which, in the end, poses more problems than it is worth. Even at room temperature, it takes a long time for a chef's knife (and even less for a juvenile tooth) to pass through his jugular, and any slice that comes off cleanly represents a commitment too big for the jaw human. Freeze most of the rabbit for later is even worse, and it takes a little thaw, even to put the Santoku again.

Instead, I prefer the Palmer suite of Easter bunnies. There is a nice variety of rabbit "characters" to choose from, so each basket recipient receives something unique. They are hollow, so you can polish everything in one session without feeling hospitalized. And since they are cheap, you can buy extras to freeze for your sweet tooth after Easter. The creative advantage of Palmer has always been its multicolored moldings, which add a vivacity to an otherwise monochrome product. (If you'd like more Palmer recommendations, I can not say enough about their Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's Day miniatures.)

More chocolate, of course

A controversial opinion: I do not think Easter is the perfect time for dark chocolate. It's more a sensual and valentine thing. It's a flavor too sophisticated for this spring and technicolor holiday, and its complex aromas of grapes, while being delicious, would overwhelm the contents of other baskets. Dark chocolate purists can close the door on their way out.

But that still leaves a lot of variety, and it's this variety that I find crucial in keeping your Easter premium. To include a couple of each:

• Rabbits stuffed with marshmallow: Brach's and Russell Stover are each a beautiful individually wrapped option; Marshmallow provides an element of elastic texture that is fun to eat and just small enough that you do not have to share it.
• Bunny Munny Double Crisp Chocolate Pieces: Also produced by Palmer (hey, it's not my fault, it's the king of spring), these sheets-wrapped pieces combine a satisfying tightening with the satisfaction of a cold coin. I hope that our legal offer is half as beautiful as these delicacies decorated with ducklings.
• White chocolate: This is less essential, but certainly adds variety. And yes, I know that it is not technically chocolate, thank you, I m plug. If M & M are your motto, buying white chocolate Easter pasta is a great way to incorporate them into the basket with minimal redundancy. Marshmallow with white chocolate seems interesting too, if you deviate a little from the field.

Eggs

Easter is not just rabbits; it is about the multitude of colored eggs that they lay obviously for the children, and that the biological inaccuracies are cursed. Confectioners have known for a long time that an egg is the ideal form to stuff a discarded amount of stuffing. You would do well to include one of each variety in your Easter basket:

• Robin's eggs: Robin Eggs is a skilful seasonal disguise for malted milk dumplings. There is a much more colorful interpretation of the classic Whopper product and a lighter offer to break the rich density of the other baskets. They do not come out of their bags, so they can be dispersed in a playful way among artificial grasses or any other filling material, thus reproducing a tiny hunt for Easter eggs in the basket.
• Reese's egg: Although they have diversified in recent years to include a three-dimensional cream egg with peanut butter, the original flatter egg is, in my opinion, the superior product. The chocolate layer, thinner and more malleable (which coats peanut butter instead of injecting peanut butter into he) further marries the center, creating a flexible pairing in which you will sink your teeth. As fast-paced readers point out, the relationship between chocolate and peanut butter varies greatly from one product to another – Original, Great Cup, Miniatures, Eggs, Hearts, Christmas Trees, Scary Thin, etc. it's the apex.
• Cadbury Cream Egg: Include one but no more than one. This treatment floats at a lenient level to savor exactly once a year. Otherwise, like antibiotics, you develop a resistance to his powers. The Cadbury egg is a specialty product in every sense of the word, with a liquid melting center that its Wikipedia page does not hesitate to qualify as "mimicry".[ing] albumin and yellow of a chicken egg. With an interior twice as sweet as its chocolate outside, too much good is not wonderful. If you have spent the last 40 days without chocolate during Lent, they are enough to cause a headache due to the shock of sugar.

A lively and fruity element

The chocolate, now, has been covered. In and between this should be something that breaks the delicious monotony. Beans with jelly my vote in this regard, since Easter is the only excuse for non-seniors to eat them every year. Starburst has a much brighter flavor than generic syrups on the market, in addition to grape seed like the dark beans suspects, rather than the black licorice flavor, and the green apple instead of lime.

An unsweetened item

It is a piece of the puzzle that I enjoy more as an adult, because it combines generosity and creativity. The credit goes to my husband, who surprised me last year with an Easter basket of Frank Frank Red Hot mini sauces and Nando's Peri-Peri sauces. These, combined with some fun egg seasoning packages, are a great complement to all the boiled eggs that you have possibly left out of the dye. Other ideas include small foods to eat all year round, such as dip preparations, a baby pot with bacon jam or an interesting olive oil. Just make sure the false grass provides enough cushion for all glass bottles.

A non-food trinket

It's the element that really pushes the whole cart to the next level and gives the impression that Easter morning looks like Christmas morning. It is certainly not necessary for it to be big, it's just something that could momentarily distract this mountain of sugar that attracts children and adults. For kids, this could be an accessory of a toy that they already have: an American Girl Doll outfit; an expansion pack for the card games they currently play, and for adults, it can be an EP or a mini Moleskine newspaper. Just something delicious to discover behind all this chocolate.

This list is intended for the most successful, but not necessarily the big spenders. The careful selection of each element of this recommended spread will not make you run faster than, for example, the pre-packaged baskets at CVS and Kroger. He is aiming for variety in relation to volume, and his tactics have been both adopted by me and exerted on me, leading to very memorable Easter mornings. If you read so far, you're probably not the type to ask why a well-developed adult is still enjoying Easter baskets, which is great. Watch this space next year, when I finally try to reach the most ambitious goal of the Easter basket: completely replace the false grass by Sour S'ghetti.