Killah in Germany

Friends, I have a shameful confession to make. I love Cadbury creme eggs. They're something that my parents refused to buy for me as a child, so naturally when I got to high school and could make my own purchases, I binged on Cadbury eggs as soon as they showed up in the stores in February. As an adult, I buy a 4-pack or two every season and try to parcel them out so I don't eat more than a few a week, making them last until summer. Since moving to Germany, however, the only Cadbury eggs I've purchased were the severely overpriced Mini Eggs I found at the Dublin airport in February 2012 (Cadbury is a British brand and is sold in the UK and Ireland). Other than that, I've had zero access to Cadbury products.

You can imagine, then, the delight one would feel if one was told that one could, in fact, make these childhood sugar bombs in the comfort of their own home, using products that are available for purchase in Germany. Well, it turns out you can. And then you can instantly regret ever making this discovery. Behold, the recipe for disaster:

HOW TO MAKE CREME EGGS (AKA HOW TO SPEND AN ENTIRE DAY MAKING CANDY THAT MAKES YOU HATE YOURSELF)

1. The Saturday before Easter, lazily peruse your Facebook feed. See that a friend has posted a link to a recipe for homemade Cadbury creme eggs with the comment "Well, I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend." Get moderately excited.

2. Scan through the article, realize that while you loved Cadbury creme eggs as a kid (okay, fine, as an adult too), you probably don't need to waste time and money making them from scratch, because they won't taste as good as the original anyway. Plus, you don't really have time.

3. The weekend following Easter, look through Facebook again and find that another friend has linked to the original recipe, stating that he and his wife made them and even though they didn't look like eggs, they turned out really tasty and it was fun to do and the whole thing made their relationship better and their children stronger and the world was suddenly brighter and also cancer was cured.

4. Realize that if you have this much time to browse Facebook all day, you can use some of that time to make creme eggs. Buy the ingredients for making the eggs, including half a kilo of powdered sugar and 4 bars of Ritter Sport Alpenmilchschokolade. Dream of perfect little Cadbury eggs with a German chocolate twist. Enjoy your temporary happiness while it lasts.

Melting down chocolate as a precursor to actual meltdown.

5. Make corn syrup using a sugar-to-water ratio of nearly double, which really should have been your first clue that this is a bad idea.

6. Spend your afternoon making a creme filling that consists of 95% sugar with the rest being butter, eventually realizing that what you're making is essentially glorified frosting that you then roll into little egg-shaped balls. This is foreshadowing for the fetal position that you will later assume. Stick toothpicks in the eggs for what you erroneously imagine will later be easy-breezy chocolate dipping funtimes. Place eggs in freezer. Realize that by merely licking your fingers and/or the mixing spoon, you have already consumed enough sugar by this step to kill a baby badger.

7. Start melting chocolate over a double boiler at 11pm on a Sunday night, knowing that you still have to finish dipping eggs and letting them set before you can clean your mess up and go to bed. Think fleetingly about how the sugar in your system won't let you sleep. Push the thought from your mind.

Instead, keep your eyes on the prize.

8. Dip one egg and realize the chocolate is not deep enough to cover the egg. Get a spoon involved. Spoon chocolate desperately onto the egg, creating a giant globular mess that more resembles a bird's nest than an egg. Push the toothpick it into a halved potato so as to let the egg stand and dry and drip chocolate all over a perfectly good potato.

9. Get two eggs done in this fashion that actually look somewhat like eggs before devolving into a crazed chocolate-slinging madwoman because the goddamn eggs won't stay on their goddamn sticks and the chocolate is hot enough that it burns your fingers when it drips on you and you can't take pleasure in licking the chocolate off your fingers because it's more to prevent burn damage than anything else and you've already got enough sugar pulsing through your veins as it is and you really don't know why you're making these stupid eggs anyway because you're sure as hell not going to eat them.

10. Ponder your life choices.

11. Sluggishly wash all the dishes in a heightened state of sugar shock.

12. Call your friend in Seattle on Skype at 1 AM and look like death on toast as you explain to him via webcam that you spent all day making amorphous sugar blobs that no one is going to eat. Pause a lot during the conversation, not for emphasis but because the sugar has bored holes into the parts of your brain that control speech. Wonder if you will ever want to ever again eat anything sweet, or if the sudden-onset diabetes that you have most certainly contracted will prevent you from doing it anyway. End the call around 2:30 AM in an attempt to find the sleep that stubbornly alludes you, partially due to the sugar aftershocks but mostly due to the sweet little chocolate-covered demons that taunt you from their resting place in the fridge, calling you out on your failure to behave like a rational adult human being.

The spoils of sweet, sweet war.