Top five classic Australian Easter egg favourites

Eggs these days. I don't know. Walk down a supermarket's promotional aisle in March and you're ambushed by a Mars Bar attack. All the chocolate choices seem to be based on existing confectionery, branded with cartoon characters, or linked to a sporting team. I think I saw a Dockers egg in Coles last week. It's the off-season for Peter Rabbit's sake!

I remember a time when Easter chocolate choices for were easy. Lindt gold bunnies for the adults, elegant rabbits for the kids. Simple stuff. These are the Easter presents I received as a tyke. Here are five of those classics. Jump on the comments and share your favourite too.

Elegant Rabbit

And presenting the homecoming king and queen of the Easter morning ball ... Mr and Mrs Elegant Rabbit! Easter isn't complete without foot-long gender-specific bunny. My parents still give me one every time I visit them for the long weekend.

The first bite of an elegant rabbit was always a little depressing. No child wants to destroy those tall and noble ears. But, after that

Humpty Dumpty

The thing I used to anticipate most about Easter wasn't seafood smorgasbords, Violet Crumble eggs, or camping trips to Crescent Head. It was the knock-off Smarties inside a Humpty Dumpty. No idea why they tasted so much better than actual Smarties, but all the king's horses and all the king's men had Buckley's of putting Humpty back together after I'd cracked his cranium for the treasure inside.

I'm sure the Humpty Dumpty chocolate mould of my childhood also included the egg-head's death-trap perch. It would sit sturdily in the fridge like a Hadrian's Wall built by Willy Wonka, all the while slowly crumbling at the hands of peckish children.

These days you only get Humpty by himself and the "Smarties" taste like M&M's.

Treasure Hunt Mini-Eggs

The solid-chocolate mini-eggs that are the candy canes of Easter. Always a popular choice for making a trail that would lead to a bigger treat (invariably a Humpty Dumpty) or hiding in the backyard for a treasure hunt.

No stone, grate, plant, ant nest, or kitty litter tray would remain unturned on a quest to gather as many inch-high foil-wrapped chocolates as my sister and I could. Of course, it was all about the hunt because by Easter Sunday we had reached peak mini-egg after eating them at school and church fetes all week.

Also, few things had more novelty as an eight-year old than fishing a tennis ball out of a gutter during backyard cricket and discovering a lost treasure-egg hidden six months before.

The Nougat Egg

Darrell Lea, what have you done? What happened to the baby chicken that would roost on my flat-bottomed nougat egg each year? I loved that little ball of yellow fluff. Every Easter, he would join Jurassic Park action figures and alien finger-puppets in mantlepiece battle against slappy-hands and Lego cannons when they still could still shoot cannonballs at a pace.

Bring back baby chicken or G.I. JOE cops a rubber band to the face!

Cadbury Creme Egg

Something of a perennial egg, yes, although I still count the Cadbury Creme as an Easter treat. I grew up in a house where Froot Loops where only bought to make necklaces at birthday parties, so the concept of keeping a hatful of these in my school desk like the specky brat on the telly commercial was unthinkable.

Creme Eggs would only make an appearance at Easter and I suspect Dad ate most of them before begrudgingly handing the remainder to us kids.