original Dracula’s Secret, before it was classified ‘deadly’, to make it sound more scary.
Kids today, eh? Addled with filthy music, junk food and daft fashions, and well before they reach their teenage years. Why can’t they just grow up naturally, like we used to? I blame these raunchy new pop stars. Like that David Essex. And the Rollers, they’re wrong ‘uns. And as for that rag Whizzer and Chips...’ It’s the eternal refrain, but you heard it in the Daily Mirror first, when in the early ’70s they identified the ‘Weenies’, an ominous new, conspicuously consuming, old-before-their-time pre-teen generation. While perusing life-size posters of Kenny, these reprobates subsisted on a diet of Trebor Blobs, spaghetti hoops and ‘iced lollipops – especially the “frighteners” like Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret’. Horror again! The nation’s moral guardians would no doubt have preferred a series of ice lollies themed around the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme or Hard Sums, but it was not to be.
The spine-tingling ice under analysis came from Wall’s: ‘a creation of “black as night” water ice with a concealed centre of ice cream as bright as the moon when it’s full’. Such florid descriptions were part and parcel of the horror genre of course, and someone in the publicity department relished being HP Lovecraft for a day. The design team went that extra mile, too: the following year, the Count was on the receiving end of the industry’s first focus-group makeover, after a panel of kids demanded he be made ‘even more deadly looking’ with an additional core of strawberry jelly. Food and fanbase in perfect, fiendish harmony.
Children’s enthusiasm being the mercurial thing it is, though, the Count only saw a handful of summers before Wall’s saw fit to hammer a stick through his heart. You can’t keep a good vamp down, though, and he rose again in 1981, this time just as ‘Dracula’, but in glorious, chiselled 3D. ‘The first ever 3D lolly,’ in fact, ‘complete with protruding fangs and talons and appropriate strawberry colouring.’ This masterpiece of the ice moulder’s art was cast from a model by one Bob Donaldson, ‘who has also been commissioned to sculpt for the Queen’. European aristocracy has connections everywhere, even beyond the grave.
Love at first bite. Wall’s Dracula (1981), ultimately resurrected in 2013.
Easter bon-bonnet. Cadbury’s Creme Egg (1971).
Though various fondant-filled eggs had been produced by Cadbury since 1923, it wasn’t until decimalisation that the Brummie confectioners finally cracked it with the consumer. That consummate assemblage of foil wrapper, chocolate shell, thick sugary albumen and all-important yolk centre debuted amid precious little fanfare. (Readers in Scotland had their own chocolate-filled egg.)
A short TV spot encouraging the customary Jennings-like schoolchildren to overwhelm shopkeepers with demands for ‘6,000 Creme Eggs, please’ failed to take into account the limited means of the audience. But the marketers persisted and eventually hatched a television campaign based around a reworking of Cole Porter’s genteel and only slightly racist song, ‘Let’s Do It’, which saw all manner of shy debutantes, maiden aunts and girls in France falling for the irresistible charms of the ovoid snack. Impressionable kids scrambled to empty their piggy banks and helped boost sales from around 50 million in the mid-’70s to nearly 200 million by the early ’80s.
In 1984 Cadbury’s creative agency, Triangle, no doubt spurred on by the success of Masquerade, Kit Williams’s kids’ book, conceived an unashamedly derivative national treasure hunt for twelve golden eggs. Caskets were buried in far-flung corners of the countryside (though one, discovered accidentally, nearly blew the lid off the whole enterprise) and Creme Egg fans were invited to send off for, and solve, the Conundrum. Within three months, Cadbury had to call a press conference to halt overzealous punters digging up stone circles, hill forts and Christian burial sites in search of the £10,000 (‘Garrards certified retail value’) eggs. As far as slogans go, ‘Stop looking on or around Pendle Hill and the Wrekin’ is about as off-brand as you can get.
Foiled again? Cadbury makes it difficult for treasure hunters to poach themselves a golden egg.
Scotch egg. Cadbury’s Border Creme Egg (1970) eschews sausage and breadcrumbs in favour of a chocolate fondant centre.
However, all this hedge-hopping hadn’t gone unnoticed and Cadbury’s rivals soon poached the egg idea for their own retail lines. Rowntree introduced both the Toffee Mallow and Fresh Minty Egg (in 1982), and Terry’s hit back with the Nutcracker (ostensibly the same shape, only wrinkled, filled with caramel and nuts), then, in 1988, the ill-advised ‘indulgent novelty’ that was the Pyramint. Aimed at an older market, and fabulously advertised by the voice-artist dream-team of Leslie Phillips and Kenneth Williams, both hamming it up for all they were worth with an Egyptian mummy, it was a massive flop.
Too large, too unwieldy and too messy to eat, Pyramint barely survived three years before being resurrected in a four-segment bar format and then quietly interred for a million years. The Creme Egg, however, continued to grow (not literally, it has genuinely always been the same size). In 1986 the question ‘How do you eat yours?’ was raised, backed by an in-store promotion inviting shoppers to collect fifteen wrappers and send in for a free ‘computer-produced personality analysis’. (RESULT: YOU ARE BEREFT OF LOVE AND FILL THE ACHING HOLE THAT REMAINS WITH CHOCOLATE.) Then, in 1992, Cadbury’s very own Easter Bunny laid her first Caramel Egg (again, not literally; that would be the weirdest cartoon ever). The nest, as they say, is history.
The yolk’s on you. Cadbury’s Easter catalogue leads with a ‘cracking’ pun for 1986.
Land of milk (chocolate) and honey (comb). Cadbury’s Crunchie (1929) is foiled again.
Honeycomb, cinder toffee, call it what you will, it’s as old as the hills. It’s easy to make: get some sugar and corn syrup extremely bloody hot, bung in some baking powder, stand well back, and there you have it. Or rather, there you have irregular lumps of it. It’s how you tame the fragile honeycomb into a sleek polyhedron that’s the tricky part.
Aussie manufacturer Hoadley’s started squaring the brittle in 1918 with the Violet Crumble. The down-under spies at Fry’s reported this back to their Keynsham HQ, and a race was on to replicate it. Early attempts were unreliable, Fry’s having to employ women specially to solder snapped bars back together with bunsen burners, but eventually a nifty system of cutting the slabs with a high-pressure jet of oil solved the problem. Add a distinctive heavy foil wrapper to stop the honeycomb going soft, and it’s Crunchie ahoy.
