Kinder-ed Spirits

Remember this guy?

Yes, it’s Vincent Price as Egghead, an arch-villain on the Batman TV series. The character made use of various egg puns, such as “I will EGG-stract your identity!” and, when he was defeated, “I am EGG-sterminated.”

All this means, obviously, that today’s blog is reviewing the Halloween version of the Kinder Joy Egg. Kinder Joy Eggs are not eggs, and they’re not particularly joyful, and they’re not even really appropriate for kinder (German for “children”), given the choking hazard warning label. But they are aimed at the young ‘uns. They combine a sweet treat with a small toy in one package. Who else would ever think of such a thing? OK, I suppose Cracker Jack has been doing it since 1873. But still.

1. Packaging. Well, it is somewhat egg-shaped, so it gets credit for living up to the hype. There’s a nod to Halloween by decorating the top of the egg with a Frankenstein face. That is, if Frankenstein ever appeared on South Park. The packaging also promises that the enclosed toy will glow in the dark. Overall, it’s a fairly compact, interesting, vaguely Halloween-themed package. 2 points.

2. Appearance of the Treat. Getting down to the treat requires two steps. First, you split the egg open, which reveals two individually-packaged half-eggs. One half contains the toy surprise (with question marks on the label to heighten your puzzlement, and a silhouette/cameo of some gender-neutral child). The other half presumably contains the treat.

Step two, you peel back the foil from the treat half of the egg, and voila! You’re face to face with a…um…..I guess it’s supposed to be an egg. With two yolks. That are brown.

The packaging suggests that the brown yolks are “cocoa wafer bites,” and that surrounding egg white is “sweet cream.” I suppose all that is fine, so far as it goes. But if you’re going to go through the effort of shaping your confection like an egg, why wouldn’t you follow through when it came to the yolk?

So, I was inclined to give the appearance of this Kinder Egg one point, but then I figured I should include the appearance of the toy in this rating.

The toy (and I use that word loosely) is 3/4″ tall plastic witch doctor (?). And the large mask does indeed glow in the dark. So let’s give it another point. 2 points.

3. Taste. The actual candy is difficult to remove from its plastic tomb. I ended up using a spoon to dig it out. It turns out the “sweet creme” is a thin layer of gelatinous goo sitting atop a chocolate-like mousse. The combined effect was way, way too rich and cloyingly sweet. Surprisingly, the cocoa wafer bites were the best part — light, crispy, and slightly salty. If the egg were just one big cocoa wafer bite, I’d give it three points. But with the cloying goo, I can’t give more than 2 points. So, 2 points.

4. Value. The actual candy in this “egg” has a net weight of only 0.7 ounce. And it costs $1.50. That works out to $34 per pound. That amount of money would have bought you an ounce of gold in 1971. So, it’s definitely not a good value for candy. However, you have to also consider the value of the “glow in the dark toy,” which I’d peg at about 2 cents. Overall, this is not a good value. Save your money and buy Covid vaccine futures. 0 points.

Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 6 out of 12 points, which places it in that netherworld between TRICK and TREAT. Let’s call it a TREACK.