Paul A Young Golden Champagne Egg

Happy day-after-Easter, everyone! Have you all gone and gotten clearance Creme Eggs & giant novelty chocolate bunnies? Good!

I went with one very special egg this year, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm thinking about going to Paul A Young tomorrow to see if there are A) any left, and B) if they're on sale.

There were 2 fully filled eggs out this year from Paul A Young, a change from previous years which only saw one flavor released. Joining salted caramel in 2014 was this champagne egg. I've had the salted caramel one before, prior to my blog beginning, but the review would be like this: drooling noise, indistinguishable chewing

So, I had high hopes for the champagne egg. These chocolate eggs are like I always wanted as a kid, a large and fully filled egg - back then it was a Creme Egg I was dreaming of at this size, but nowadays I'm slightly more sophisticated. I would like any kind of filling, including a giant Creme Egg. With age comes wisdom, I say.

A nice feature of this egg was the porcelain egg cup & spoon being included, for ease of eating. Being a large & fully filled egg, it might've been kind of tough otherwise. The only downside with this is that since they're nice quality bits it probably upped the cost quite a bit. It was  a luxury at £20, but you do get some tableware along with your dessert! I'm no egg cup expert, this is the first I've ever owned if you can believe that, but it seems nice. Certainly kept the champagne egg in one place.

 It was a beautiful egg, too - nice gold shimmer across and a cool embossed effect. Eating it with the cute little set made it feel even more special.

My husband did the honors of the initial bite this time - see, I'm throwing the forensic teams off my scent by making use of a different set of choppers.

The inside ganache was very wet feeling, but thick - it was able to balance the spoon, and when held upside down it wouldn't spill out. It was also much more alcoholic tasting than say, a Charbonnel et Walker champagne truffle - which are of course quite nice, but they taste quite a bit more like a chocolate than champagne. I'm not sure how it was done, but I'm glad it was - it even tasted bubbly. I'm not a champagne connoisseur (oh really, you're asking, you who a few paragraphs ago wished for a giant Creme Egg aren't a champagne connoisseur? I would've thought such a refined palette  as yours would love champagne, I suppose next you'll be telling me that you had to look up how to spell connoisseur!) but this tasted like the stuff I've had before that was labeled 'champagne'. Fizzy, fruity, and with a boozy burn.

The outer milk chocolate shell was also very good - it had a cool, melting sort of sensation. I rarely get to try so much Paul A Young chocolate without any filling, but it's quality stuff. I'd say the milk chocolate was just as 'complex' as the dark, which might be controversial to dark chocolate lovers. Hey, I never said Creamy Steaks wouldn't take it there.

Since I've had both, I know that my preference would actually be for the salted caramel egg - it's just more my style. I like the dark chocolate's slight bitterness, the sweet of the caramel, and the saltiness of the...salt. My husband however prefers the champagne - he's more of a food appreciator than appraiser, so his reasoning is just that he likes champagne filling more.

I'm looking forward to more of these filled eggs, I hope in the coming years there are even more flavors!