Cadbury Easter Hunt: Bringing a little taste of home to Qatar

Being an expat you tend to miss certain home comforts that you grew up with.  I most definitely do, and top of the list for me is real Cadbury chocolate.  The creamy deliciousness of the milk chocolate melting in your mouth, that special Cadbury taste.  Nowhere else in the world does chocolate like Cadbury UK.  Nowhere.  Which is why when my mum arrived last week she came laden down with all kinds of treats and goodies.  And not just normal treats and goodies, Easter treats and goodies.

She’s a good egg (get it?!)

This Easter I’m busy bringing the Easters of my childhood to my Middle Eastern Expat kids, with both of them more used to celebrating Eid than Easter I am taking this opportunity to show them what my childhood was like, whilst explaining what holidays are traditional back in “English” as the four year old likes to describe England.  Here in Qatar, unlike the UK, Easter isn’t a public holiday, whilst we will have Good Friday and Easter Saturday off it will be back to normal for my husband on Easter Sunday as a normal working day, the extended break used to be one of my favourite things about Easter, along with 46% of other Brits as it gave me chance to spend time with family and friends.

Right now they don’t understand that there are different religions that celebrate different holidays, they just know that people pray to God and do so in various types of buildings.  It’s amazing to me that they know what a mosque looks like and are used to the sound of the call to prayer but yet stare in wonderment at churches believing them to be castles and have never heard church bells ring.  My gran will be spinning.  This Easter we’re taking the opportunity to teach them the Easter story, of crucification and resurrection in as simple terms as possible.

Then of course it will be onto the eggs.  Traditionally the eating of eggs was prohibited in holy week (the week leading up to Easter) and all eggs laid were saved, decorated and given as gifts of celebration.  This tradition has evolved from eggs to chocolate eggs as time passes by, with the first Cadbury Easter egg hatched onto the production line back in 1875.  This egg was made of dark chocolate with a plain smooth surface and filled with dragées, sugar coated chocolate drops, a far cry from the exciting varieties now available on shelves!

But where does the Easter bunny come into it I hear you cry?  Rabbits are a symbol of new life, much like the resurrection, and legend has it that the Easter Bunny lays, decorates and hides eggs for the children to find.  Celebrating new life.

This year the Cadbury Easter Bunny has set off from Bournville, with a basket filled with Easter Egg goodness featuring six new products especially for Easter 2017, to help everyone celebrate Easter around the UK.  (He’s also snuck a little further afield with us here in Qatar. )

The Great Cadbury Egg Hunt

And so our egg hunt eggstravaganza begins.  As the temperature is hotting up here and it’s now school holidays we were able to get out and about first thing, and of course first thing with my boys means we were out hunting by 7:30am.  Which I realise now leads to chocolate for breakfast.

Leaving the boys with my mum I headed down to the grassy area in our compound to set up the hunt, with more places for them to be hidden than our sparse back yard.  As they are only little still really and with the sun racing against us I choose to do an “easy peasy” hunt, hiding the eggs in plain sight for them to delight in finding.

Then it was time to race back and get on our bikes, bunny ears and all, to follow the clues that the Easter Bunny had left us, from the footprints taped on the floor to the signs saying “eggs this way”.

Eggs found it was time to head home to indulge in our spoils… luckily the treat sized pack is perfect for little hands to enjoy without causing too much of a sugar overload.  The rest of the mini chocolate eggs were snuck back into the fridge after the high temperatures caused them to melt, the Oreo eggs in particular are a little bit splatted after the basket went flying.

I’m so pleased that my mum came out laden with Cadbury Easter goodies for us to enjoy.  It hasn’t felt like Easter the past few years without a Cadbury egg (a Cadbury buttons one especially), there’s just something about egg-shaped chocolate that makes it taste even better than normal.

Not only that, but the mini eggs (that’s she busy pinching off sharing with me) are the ideal size to add as rocks for a certain someone’s second birthday cake… the little one turns two on Easter Sunday and will be enjoying a Cadbury laden cake now – if you need some baking inspiration and aren’t busy making a birthday cake there are lots of fun Easter recipes to try.

Find out more…

Eating Easter chocolate (Cadbury naturally) is one of the top activities people like to do over the Easter weekend, with your friends and family, it’s been found that a lack of inspiration of what to do and keep everyone entertained (from Granny all the way down to the baby) is something that people struggle with.

This year the Cadbury Easter Bunny has been living up to his name and has hidden all manner of chocolate goodies across various National Trust properties across the UK (including two close to my heart – Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, both the scene of many a school trip for me).  Don’t worry though he’s left plenty of clues along the way…

To find out more on the Cadbury Egg Hunt you can visit https://easter.cadbury.co.uk/ or visit @CadburyUK on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

If you can’t make it to a National Trust property, like us, don’t worry because there is also an eggstra special egg hunt pack to help you arrange your own Easter Egg hunt at home, complete with clues and props, as you can see we managed to make our very own Easter Bunny.

Fun Cadbury Easter Egg Facts

When I was at home over the summer last year we headed over to Cadbury World, where the Bournville factory is, to see how chocolate was made as one of our (many) day trips.  Being down the road from my mum it was fascinating to watch as you had an insight into the factory.  An incredible demonstration of how you temper chocolate by hand.  And of course all of the chocolate we got to eat.  All. Of.  The. Chocolate.

Right now the factory is busy making Easter Eggs.  And by busy I mean really busy…

1. 255,000 Cadbury Easter Eggs are made at the Bournville factory every day
2. That is 10,625 Cadbury Easter Eggs made per hour… and 177 per minute!
3. If you stacked every Cadbury Easter Egg made at Bournville every day on top of each other you’d have a tower of Cadbury Eggs as high as 98 Eiffel Towers’, 76 Empire State Building’s, 305 Big Ben’s, or 11,590 Sultan Kosen’s – the tallest man in the world!
4. Over 83 million* Easter Eggs are sold in the UK over the Easter season, with the Cadbury Creme Egg 138g Easter Egg being the most popular variant