Gourmet Danish confectionery brand LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW ÆGGs, is on a mission to spread a lot of liquorice love this Easter, with their chocolate-coated alternative to your traditional egg.
Milk chocolate – the original version – is wrapped around a core of salty liquorice, combined with little chunks of crispy sweet caramel or crunchy toffee, formed into mini egg shapes and dusted with liquorice powder.
Marmite is the word that comes to mind. No, the eggs themselves taste nothing like Marmite – they taste like liquorice covered in chocolate – but that’s the issue: people are either loving or hating the very idea!
Usually if I’m given sweets to review, everyone is suddenly my best friend; this time, I was looked at on a spectrum from interest to confusion to downright suspicion. I apparently ‘cheated’ a very sad 8 year old by showing her things that looked like giant Maltesers but tasted like baby alien eggs.
My 12 year old disagreed. He liked them, especially the toffee ones, but he’s half way there, already partial to salty-sweet flavours. I liked them for the same reason; there is definite sweetness from the chocolate but it subtly underscored by the liquorice.
By this time, I was on a mission to get a representative sample of what the folks of my bit of Edinburgh had to say. Armed with my egg selection I went to the community centre where I teach and shared the chocolates liberally: staff, parents in the baby group, creative writers and the Thursday lunch club.
The verdict: about two-thirds in favour and the rest against. Nobody was on the fence. A few people came back for more and clearly enjoyed every mouthful; some were surprised they liked it; some were pleasantly reminded of things they’d eaten in Scandinavia; one or two spent the rest of the morning pulling faces and needing copious cups of tea to wash the taste away – but they were self-confessed Creme Egg addicts. And LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW ÆGGs are as far away from those as chalk is from cheese.
They eggs are an acquired taste, but once people understood what they were getting (i.e. not Maltesers) quite a few seemed to acquire it quickly. ‘You couldn’t eat too many’, was a recurring comment – with the frequent caveat that that was a good thing.
This does sit at the pricey end of luxury confectionary – a small jar is £10.00, a regular one £15.00 and an ÆGG (480g worth) is £24.00 – so you might want to be sure that your giftee is already a liquorice lover, or is open to being so!
All LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW products are created with sustainability at the forefront; it’s the first confectionery company globally to use 100% recycled plastic and has been doing so since 2019. The liquorice products originate in Copenhagen, in a factory running on 100% green energy.
LAKRIDS BY BÜLOW is available in high end UK stores such Selfridges, Fenwick and Harvey Nichols, or online at: lakridsbybülow.co.uk