Nicholas Jordan goes on the hunt for good Easter eggs.After nibbling through 29 products, he is glad the ovum ordeal is overGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIf you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us todayWhen I was a kid, chocolate usually came with some kind of regulatory statement: “you can have some if you finish your dinner”, or “don’t eat it all at once”.But at Easter, that went out the window.The amount of chocolate I ate then is barely believable.Now that adult me is making the decisions, I can eat chocolate whenever I want, with the fervour of an unaccompanied labrador in a pet food shop.

But it’s rarely at Easter.Sadly, now I think of Easter as culinary enshittification.I imagine waxy chocolates making my fingers oily, compound chocolate (like regular chocolate but with more oil in it) that tastes like a patty of melted marshmallows, and unidentifiable cream fillings that ooze like sunscreen.What I wanted from this taste test was hope.Hope that delicious chocolate still exists in foil wrappers, hope that my unbridled childhood joy isn’t a relic but a reality for adult me.

I knew there would be terrors lying at the bottom end of the scale, but I hoped there would be surprises at the top, as well as some affordable middle range options that I – and the child version of me – would happily eat.Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningThe blind taste test consisted of supermarket chocolate eggs that were foil-wrapped and small enough for hiding and hunting.We tried to include at least one from each of the major brands, and two if the brand has a large range.We tasted 29 eggs – a quantity so severe, it was difficult to recruit reviewers.Six friends joined me, one who brought along their three-year-old.

The adults scored each egg on taste and texture.The three-year-old happily ate chocolate without judgment.My hopes weren’t crushed; they were gradually, over the course of 29 rounds, replaced by a single, sad thought: the quality of Easter chocolate is simply worse than chocolate any other time of the year.Imagine going to a harvest festival only to discover the town’s most frugal citizen arranges the annual feast.Even though there were some decent Easter eggs, by the end I was just happy the test was over, and so was everyone else in the room – besides one person, of course.

The three-year-old enjoyed every egg.Ferrero Collection Chocolate Wafer Eggs, 100g, $9.30, available at major supermarketsScore: 9/10No one wants to read an article claiming the best house is a mansion on the water.Ferrero Rocher is the best Easter egg.Great.

What will you do with that information? Throw your weekly budget out the window? Well, here’s the thing.All Easter egg chocolate is expensive.Our bill for this test was the second-highest in the column’s history.When you compare the major brands’ regular chocolate blocks with their Easter equivalents, the eggs typically cost 13% more by weight.And these, the best of the lot, cost just a little more than the average egg price.

At Aldi, they’re almost $3 cheaper than the supermarket duopoly.While you may not get the nut-speckled outer layer of the OG Ferrero Rocher, you get the wafer, the whole-hazelnut centre, the ganache and a standard of chocolate that reassures you that this was made by people with integrity.The only worry is whether this would withstand the violence of an Easter egg hunt.Koko Black Milk Little Eggs, 150g, $19.99 ($13.

33 per 100g), available at select grocersScore: 7,5/10My scorecard read: “It’s chocolato!” Why I wrote this in faux Italian, I don’t know,The point is, I was thrilled, giddy even, to eat a chocolate that was unambiguously what it claimed to be: chocolate,I wasn’t the only one,“The first actually chocolate egg,” and “most choc so far”, two other reviewers wrote.

Koko Black had the third-highest amount of cocoa solids (34%), after Loco Love (55%!) and Health Lab (35%),Despite the high score, it says a lot that no one voted it their favourite,It’s like listening to jazz at a dinner party – as much as you enjoy it, what would you be able to say about it the next day?Hugos Hazelnut Cream Mini Eggs, 100g, $4,49, available at AldiScore: 7/10I didn’t record how many Easter eggs were unrecognisable as chocolate, but there were a lot,This was one of the only ones where I didn’t care.

Instead of chocolate, I classified this as cereal candy, as if it’s made from rice bubbles speckled into cereal milk, and condensed into a vaguely chocolatey texture,Which is extremely funny to me now that I’ve learned these are meant to be hazelnut and knafeh flavoured,That doesn’t affect my desire to eat them,If for some reason they don’t sell, they should be rebranded as a breakfast treat,Coles Finest Swiss Chocolate Mini Easter Eggs Sea Salt, Caramel, Almond Nougat & Milk Chocolate, 120g, $5.

50 ($4,58 per 100g), available from ColesScore: 6,5/10This was the first egg we tried,There was a tentative but wide chorus of nods accompanied by the odd “oh yeh” and “not bad”,Most enjoyed the salty, caramel shards and the triple-layer texture, but were conflicted about the actual chocolate – at first, many reviewers gave the eggs low scores.

But by the end of the taste test, those numbers were scribbled out and replaced by respectable sixes and sevens.After several hours of watching kids’ TV, even a basic soap opera is going to be interesting.Lindt Milk Chocolate Mini Eggs, 90g, $7.50 ($8.33 per 100g), available at major supermarketsScore: 8.

5/10Everyone guessed the brand after the first bite.We’ve all eaten Lindt balls before and the only perceivable differences between this and the regular ball are the egg shape and the cheaper price tag.Unlike most of their competitors, it seems Lindt distributes Easter spirit charitably.That or the egg machine runs at a lower cost.Kinder Bueno Eggs, 140g, $13 ($9.

29 per 100), available at major supermarketsScore: 8/10After many taste tests, the reviewers and I have started guessing which product is the Aldi knockoff – we’re rarely right.We thought this was Aldi’s Easter take on Kinder Surprise or Ferrero Rocher – there was a wafer layer, a vaguely hazelnutty cream filling – but it was too sweet to match the originals.At least we were right about that.The eggs have 6g more sugar per 100g than a bar of Kinder Bueno.It tastes like Kinder Bueno made for children, if it wasn’t already.

Loco Love Cosmic Chocolate Eggs Luvio Salted Caramel, 270g, $39.99 ($14.81 per 100g), available at select grocersScore: 6.5/10We tasted this flavour and the brand’s Coconut Dream flavour.They made me feel as if I was doing a grape juice taste test and, after having tasted 25 sweet, thin fruit concentrates, I was served two glasses of shiraz and asked to rate them with the same criteria.

While the chocolate in the other eggs was mostly hyper-sweet and of questionable composition, the Loco Love chocolates were bitter, slightly acidic and complex – “a mix of liquorice and coffee”, one reviewer wrote.They have the snap of a good dark chocolate, and they’re smooth and cleanly designed like a board game token.But that’s just the chocolate.The reviewers failed to accurately identify either filling, some failed to differentiate them, and there were surprisingly few notes about them, aside from pleasant remarks about the pops of salt.But, again, after 25 grape juices, both the best and worst shiraz will confuse you.

Which is why, I imagine, the scores for this ranged from four to eight out of 10.Cadbury Dairy Milk Milk Chocolate Easter Eggs, 243g, $13 ($5.35 per 100g), available at major supermarketsScore: 6/10I’ve written about my disappointment in Cadbury before.The reason it got a higher mark here doesn’t at all reflect a difference in quality, it reflects a difference in the field.When you’re eating Hello Kitty-branded compound chocolate and Life Savers chocolate eggs speckled with Fruit Tingles, Cadbury feels like a pretty safe middle ground.

“I think this is better than bad,” one reviewer wrote.Dairy Fine Milk Chocolate Solid Eggs, 400g, $7.99 ($2 per 100g), available at AldiScore: 5/10Sometimes it’s hard to find the threshold between what is real and what is imitation.Is a Beatles cover band with Paul McCartney in it a cover band or the Beatles? If orange juice is filtered, pasteurised, heated, evaporated, frozen, rehydrated and then mixed with various oils and essences, is it still orange juice? In the case of chocolate, you don’t have to imagine because it’s Dairy Fine.These Easter eggs taste as if they’re doing the bare minimum to be considered decent chocolate and nothing more (at 27% cocoa solids, it is literally the least chocolatey chocolate of any taste test egg that doesn’t come with a compound label).

What does that taste like? Faint, sweet and old, like an Easter egg that rolled to the back of your fridge last April,Darrell Lea Mini Chocolate Easter Hunt Eggs, 110g, $7,50 ($6,82 per 100g), available at WoolworthsScore: 3/10I asked ChatGPT to predict the scores and ranking of all 29 Easter eggs we tried,It predicted Darrell Lea would get an 8.

8 out of 10, landing it in sixth place,It said: “Aussie classic – less flashy but very solid,” This is what the humans who ate it said:“Looks like my fingers after a two-hour bath,”“Waxy, sticky and slightly minty,Tastes anti-luxury.

”“This is what I imagine dog chocolate would taste like,”“Probably found in the egg hunt at your local hostel,”“Yucko,”“Why does the taste linger so much?”Health Lab Gooey Caramel Mylk Chocolate Half Eggs, 100g, $12, available at major supermarketsScore: 1,5/10Originally, I chose not to include this.

What’s the point of including a product that’s neither good nor particularly easy to find? But my editor changed my mind: the readers would want to know what the lowest-scoring product is like, she said,And, this isn’t just the lowest-scoring Easter egg – it’s the lowest-scoring product of all 600-plus supermarket items I’ve tried for the three years I’ve been writing this series,A friend sitting across from me was the first person to eat it: No, no, no, no, no, she said,“What is it?”, the other reviewers asked,“How can chocolate be this confusing?” one said.

Despite having the second-highest percentage of cocoa solids, the chocolate has so little flavour – no sweetness, no acidity, no salt, just a faint bitterness, like eating a spoonful of cold, congealed oil.“Like gum you’ve been chewing for hours,” a reviewer wrote.And although the caramel centre looks like caramel, it tastes like neither butter nor sugar.It’s vegan but that didn’t seem to be an issue for Loco Love.Two reviewers simply wrote “the worst”.

I can see why these are limited edition; they already know there will be no repeat customers.