Thursday, January 14, 2010

Mary Sue Easter Eggs


Mary Sue Easter Eggs, originally uploaded by retrogemkitty7.

What's on everyone's mind in January? How to pay off holiday bills? The beach? Getting rid of extra holiday poundage to look good at the beach? No, according to the folks at Giant food, it's... Easter candy! I was doing a bit of grocery shopping & having a text-message conversation with my friend L last week when I noticed that the Pikesville Giant already had Mary Sue Easter eggs out for sale. Mary Sue is a Baltimore-based candy company, in business since 1948, & they make the best chocolate Easter eggs in the world. No contest. I grew up eating Russell Stover Easter candy & have since expanded my palate by tasting many high-end chocolates, seasonal & otherwise, as the number of Maison du Chocolat charges on my credit card over the years will attest to. Still, for this Midwestern expat who was once married to a Baltimore native, nothing says "spring" like Mary Sue.

That said, I was still appalled at first... our daytime highs weren't going much above 30! Still, I couldn't resist going over to the shelf where the eggs were displayed to see if my favorite flavor, Triple Chocolate Meltdown, was there for the taking. Nope, only Pecan Nougat & Coconut Cream. I do like the latter, but can live without the former. (I rarely indulge in sweets that don't involve dark chocolate.) The whole time, I was texting L about this, rhapsodizing about the incredible yumminess that is to be found in Mary Sue Easter Eggs. L lives on the west coast & is Mary Sue-deprived, so I'll be sending her a care package as soon as I can get my bejeweled little hands on a Triple Chocolate Meltdown or two (or three or...) I'll probably buy some for myself too, to save them. After all, these babies are notorious for selling out well before Easter. Or, in my house, for getting eaten well before Easter, resulting in extra work at the gym & perhaps a few very light dinners to compensate for the chocolate calories.

So am I a seasonal sellout? A hopeless chocoholic? Both? That's open to interpretation. For now, I leave you with an old-school Mary Sue jingle, taught to me by my first husband, & sung to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's "I'm Called Little Buttercup":

Mary Sue Easter Eggs
Mary Sue Easter Eggs
People are making the switch
'Cause using pure butter
Makes Mary Sue better
And you've never had it so rich!

(Alternate last line a la 1950's schoolchildren: Now ain't that a son of a...)

Good night, chocolate lovers.

4 comments:

  1. (2-18-10 OH MARY) Hi, My Name is Bob and I am a compulsive overeater.

    Yesterday afternoon, I had just finished running some errands and was stopping to get gas at a local convenience chain store. As always, I went in to get a coffee to take with me. I was on my way to an evening auction. As I stood in line and waited to pay for the coffee, I turned my head and saw a display that featured my old girl friend. We have been friends for over fifty years. There she was in this big display, in all her glory! Her name is Mary Sue. Maybe you know her, she comes around every Easter with the best peanut butter candy eggs you ever tasted. Standing there in line, realizing, OH NO! not again! Another holiday and I can’t have any Easter candy. What, no Easter basket! No rabbit ears!. No peeps! No Mary Sue! Oh no, not again! Valentine’s day had just past and needless to say, no big red hearts came my way. And believe me that’s ok with me. But Sunday, at the flea market, some dealer friends called me over to their table and all these people were there and they sang Happy Birthday. Also, there was this big bad beautiful birthday cake, that screamed Happy Birthday BOB!!! I stood there in shock knowing that that wonderful cake would never enter my mouth and as soon as the singing ended. I said, “Thank You and enjoy“. I hurriedly went back to my table and didn’t give this much thought till the incident at the convenience store. I had blocked it out. Back to the store incident, I got out of line with my coffee and paced crazily looking for something sweet I could eat. I finally found something. I needed a fix. Sugar is my heroine and I needed to shoot up. Seeing that candy display made it all clear. I was powerless over what was happening. God help me! I can’t believe that I think that I have come so far in the OA program. Doing all the right things: meetings, reading literature, calling and emailing my sponsor, eating right and now this. It was an out of body experience that was happening as I searched the store for something to satisfy this hunger. The food item that was not on my food journal. Your messing up, I screamed, God help me!!! Finally I found these sugar free gelatin squares. Priced too high, two servings at $2.65. You have to pay when it says SUGARFREE! I paid and went to the van and disobeying my rule to never eat in the van, I devourered those little sugar free cubes, lickiey split. The Chunkie Junkie got his fix. It was sugar free , but it wasn’t in my food journal, it was consumed in a vehicle, I ate it way too fast, and I found out, yet again, that I am powerless over food. My higher power did help me make the right choices. Just think, it could have been one of those incredible little brown eggs with Mary Sue’s name on it that I was putting in my mouth. So Good-bye Mary Sue, tell the Jellie-bellies and all your friends that sugar is no longer my friend and we won’t be able to get together ever again. Have a good life as I will be having one. Peace…

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  2. I recently purchased a Mary Sue Peanut Butter Easter Egg due to a chocolate/peanut butter craving, and I'm very sad to say that I was quite disappointed. I'm commenting on your post because I wanted to find some other people's reviews of this product and didn't really find any. The peanut butter was WAY too sweet I thought, and far from average peanut butter consistency. The filling also appeared a tiny bit translucent (I can't really think of any other way to describe it) but it looked kinda like oily or something? It pretty much hardly tasted like PB at ALL.

    Your packaging looks different than mine, though, so maybe they made some changes. Who knows.

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  3. Hey, Babs! Sorry for the late reply. Lots of stuff has been going in in our kives & I'm just now getting back to blogging. I bought some of the smaller Triple Chocolate Meltdown eggs this year & they didn't taste as good as they used to. The larger one tasted the way I thought it should, or at least close. Maybe Mary Sue's recipes are changing? Say it isn't so!

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  4. Oops, I meant lives. Cold meds + bad typing skills = disaster. ;)

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