Fortnum & Mason Hand Decorated Dark Chocolate Easter Egg

Posted by in Chocolate Reviews on February 27 2012 | Leave A Comment

Christmas and Valentine’s Day have been and gone, which can only mean one thing – Easter is coming! Fortnum & Mason were kind enough to send us one of their eggs to try, and as you can see, it’s rather beautiful.

Once you undo the ribbons and remove the egg from its sturdy box, it still looks just as good. The simple, dark chocolate shell is extremely glossy, well tempered and half decorated with sugar flowers and ducklings.

It’s a 72% chocolate of unspecified origin, and although fairly easy to eat, doesn’t have a lot of flavour, so I presume is made from basic Forestero beans. For such a pretty egg, the flavour of the chocolate is something of a let-down. Not because it’s bad, but simply because it’s ordinary.

Only the front-facing half of the egg is decorates, which is fair enough, as packaging intricately decorated eggs can often be a problem. These eggs are designed so that they can sent through the post when ordered online, and mine arrived in perfect condition, and I think I’d rather sacrifice a bit of extra decoration in return for my egg arriving in one piece.

The shell itself is nice and thick, but I have to say the contents are a little disappointing. A small bag of chocolate characters made from exactly the same chocolate as the egg itself, so there’s no contrasting flavours or colours, and nothing to add a little sweetness to the egg.

I’m also a little confused, as this video on the Fortnum & Mason website, shows eggs filled with neatly packaged fresh chocolates. That’s definitely not the case here.

At £37.50 for a 227g egg, this is certainly not cheap. Obviously a lot of work goes into hand decorating and packaging an egg like this, but I’m not convinced a real dark chocolate enthusiast who might receive this as a gift will truly appreciate it, and there’s nothing to satisfy those with a sweeter tooth either.

Ultimately, it’s beautiful to look at, but the bulk of my egg ended up being broken up and going into my ‘leftover chocolate for cooking’ jar. But perhaps this egg was just not for me – there are plenty of other beautiful creations to choose from on Fortnum’s website.

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Comments On This Post

  1. Are you sure this dark egg is disapointing? If so, should you give yourself a Mars Egg over this anyday?

  2. Those bunnies with loads on their backs look like they’re carrying out slave labour!

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