All Chocolate Easter Eggs Are Straight Trash—Except This One

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Let’s face it: Most Easter treats are crap, especially chocolate eggs. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but most chocolate eggs are filled with literal nothing. You’re paying for air inside a thin-ass chocolate shell. They're basically a Ponzi scheme in candy form.

There’s only one Easter egg worth eating, and it’s from Finland and so firm and tasty that it puts all the other eggs to shame.

The Mignon egg is a real chicken eggshell filled entirely with nougat—not chocolate, but nougat. When you take a bite of it, you might be shocked to find, instead of an empty void inside, a big mouthful of creamy almond-hazelnut nougat that will give you the most intense sugar rush of your life.

This Easter egg starts its journey like an ordinary egg would, out of an actual chicken. A small hole is made on the eggshell with a diamond drill, apparently. Then all the insides get sucked out, and the shell cleaned. (I don’t know what happens to the insides, and you shouldn’t concern yourself with that either. Omelettes, probably.) Every year approximately 1.6 million empty eggshells, that’s about 23 truckloads of future Mignon eggs, are delivered to Fazer’s factory in Vantaa, Finland. Because of the delicate nature of the empty shells all Mignon eggs are hand-made. That’s like, a lot of work. Each egg is filled with 52 grams of nougat through the small hole in the shell, after which the eggs are chilled and sealed, resulting in a perfect replica of a chicken egg.

The Mignon egg has been around since 1896, and Finns can’t seem to get enough of them. Last Easter the Mignon eggs were sold out almost everywhere. Nearly two million eggs, gone.

I personally usually have one Mignon a year. Not two, not three, but one. I guess I could technically eat more, but one’s already a lot. But when the moment comes to eat one, ooh la la! I crack the shell open and enjoy the Mignon with proper gusto, devouring it like a boorish beast, perhaps with a glass of port on the side. The sugar overdose that follows is instantaneous and it’s enough to carry me through Easter, and probably the following Christmas as well.

I’m also not some kind of Mignon newcomer. I come by my love for them honestly, and there’s no small amount of nostalgia wrapped into my love for the weird little egg. When I was around ten years old, my godfather was watching me one day. I was probably being a pain in the ass, like usual, because I knew there was a Mignon egg in the house. My godfather decided to outsmart me by hiding the Mignon in a case of real chicken eggs. That didn’t stop me: I laid waste to the entire box of chicken eggs to find that special Mignon egg. It was totally worth it.