Giadzy’s exquisite Easter eggs are a link to an important cultural heritage
As a sign of the promise of new life, eggs have been a symbol of springtime in Italy for millennia. In Ancient Rome, people would bury an egg dyed red with beet juice to encourage a fruitful growing season. Later, people exchanged colorful eggs and baked them into breads, pies, and cakes to celebrate the end of Lent’s fasting rules. In the 1950s, as the restrictions of WWII were starting to ease, local pasticcerias turned to a relatively cheap but crowd-pleasing sweet—chocolate—to make decorative eggs for Easter celebrations.
That handmade tradition is still carried on today, and if you visit Italy around Easter, you’ll see local bakery windows displaying magnificent eggs with ornate icing decorations painted on by hand, wrapped with a ribbon like the stunning gifts they are. You’ll also see mass-produced eggs stacked up in grocery stores, selling the promise of chocolate and a trinket for as little as a couple of euros. Just as towering panettone boxes are ubiquitous around Christmas time, flourishes of cellophane-wrapped eggs take over Italian shops in spring.
But just like panettone, there’s a gulf of difference between a grocery store Easter egg and one made with care by one of the country’s finest chocolatiers. When we set out to create our own Giadzy Easter egg, we knew it had to live up to our panettone standards and come from a true artisan dynasty. After all, with our chocoholic-in-chief Giada taste-testing every sample, we could only call it a Giadzy product if it was the best of the best!
Luckily, we found the perfect partners in Asti, a half-hour east of the Piemonte capital of Turin. Piemonte is the apex of chocolate excellence in Italy, a region that has been producing delectable cioccolato since the treat arrived in Europe in the 16th century. These seventh-generation chocolatiers find the finest cacao in growing regions around the world and blend it with fresh Italian milk, local hazelnuts, and other carefully sourced ingredients to make the most incredible sweets we’ve ever tasted. Walking up to their production facility you’re met with the wafting smell of melting chocolate, so delicious that local children are known to play in their courtyard just to catch the scent!
Aside from the chocolate shell, the best part of any Italian Easter egg is the promise of a surprise treat inside. Here, again, there’s a massive difference in quality when it comes to what’s hiding inside. While we know kids can be happy with any little plastic trinket like the disposable whistles, rings, and other small toys usually found in grocery-store eggs, we wanted ours to please even the pickiest pasqua participant. The answer? More chocolate! Depending on which egg you choose, your Giadzy egg will come bearing either miniature chocolate eggs or luscious chocolate-hazelnut gianduja bites made by the same artisans as the egg itself.
The final touch is our Giadzy signature, an exclusive, extravagantly design wrapping that will serve as the perfect holiday centerpiece to transport you to a whimsical springtime in Italy. When you’re ready to enjoy, give the egg a crack and know you’re taking part in a generations-old tradition that tastes as good as it looks.
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