What Is A Cadbury Creme Egg's Gooey Filling Made Of?

We all know Cadbury Creme Eggs — the foil-wrapped chocolate eggs that have delighted children and adults with a creamy, gooey inside, colored to make it look like the white and yolk of a real egg. Pennsylvania-based Hershey bought the rights to U.S. Cadbury in 1988, but the first creme-filled egg hatched in the U.K. in 1923.

According to The Daily Mail, 1.5 million Cadbury Creme Eggs are made daily in the U.K. alone through a fine-tuned process. Molten chocolate is put in a half-egg-shaped mold, the filling is added, and the still-melted chocolate fuses together when joined. The eggs are air-cooled, knocked out of the mold, and mechanically wrapped. In 1985, the company asked how fans of the candy prefer to eat it — 16% of people reported they use their finger to scoop out the creme, 20% bite straight through the entire egg, and 53% bite off the end of the egg, lick out the filling, then finish the chocolate.

But about that filling — what exactly is inside that magical Cadbury Creme Egg? What goes into the squishy, yolk-colored confection?

According to SmartLabel, the ingredients of the filling for the eggs sold in the U.S. include sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor and color, calcium chloride, and egg whites. In essence, the center of those eggs is soft fondant. Homemade fondant, a love-it-or-hate-it component of desserts, is typically a combination of sugar, water, and corn syrup, though commercially made fondant usually includes some kind of stabilizer. 

Fondant isn't known for its flavor; it's generally used to make cakes — and, in this case, creme eggs — look pretty. While fondant used for the decorative exterior of cakes is pretty sturdy stuff, fondant cream can also be a rich filling for store-bought or homemade chocolate candies. Cadbury in the U.K. produces seasonally available fillings like the Cadbury White Oreo Egg, made of white chocolate filled with pieces of OREO cookies, while in the U.S., we're limited to just three flavors of filling: the traditional white-and-yellow creme, caramel, and chocolate creme.