Our Favorite Chocolate Easter Bunnies, Eggs, and More

I grew up in a Jewish household, where menorahs and Shabbat candles took the place of Christmas trees and Easter bunnies, which meant I wasn't a lot of help when our team started planning out Easter content. But even though I don’t know the first thing about Easter, I do know about candy. Searching out the very best Easter chocolates—bunnies and non-bunnies alike—was a task I could handle.

As we blind-taste-tested more than 20 milk- and dark-chocolate bunnies (and a few eggs), we agreed that most chocolate Easter bunnies are designed with cuteness in mind, while flavor and texture seem to be of minimal importance. That said, we landed on a handful of dark- and milk-chocolate bunnies that are just as delicious as they are attractive. (And, since I ended up with a ton of leftover chocolate bunnies to consume, I was inspired to make my very first Easter dinner to go along with my new candy-bunny friends—for which I’ll be relying on a solid menu to guide me.)

The Best Milk-Chocolate Easter Bunnies

Testing milk-chocolate Easter bunnies proved to be an exhausting task—we did it because we love you. Almost every bunny was cloyingly sweet, with very little balance or chocolate flavor. We were looking for a milk chocolate that was nice and creamy, with a distinct cocoa-butter flavor, and a few bunnies jumped (hopped?) out at us.

Our top milk-chocolate bunny, made by Harbor Sweets, features pieces of caramel, pecans, almonds, and butter-crunch toffee, enrobed in velvety chocolate. Although we were testing for flavor, it doesn’t hurt that this bunny is a bit more interesting to look at, as it's made with a different mold than the one used by most of its competitors.

We also enjoyed the milk-chocolate bunnies from Li-Lac and Jacques Torres. Both were nicely decorated and struck a balance between sweetness and cocoa-butter flavor. If you’re going for a more classic bunny, one that doesn’t have a textured filling, these are the bunnies for you.

The Best Dark-Chocolate Easter Bunnies

After eating my way through a mountain of milk-chocolate bunnies, I was relieved to dig into a couple dark-chocolate ones that had nice deep flavor and good texture—though we found that even the dark-chocolate bunnies tended to be quite mild, lacking the intense dark-chocolate flavor we were looking for. Our favorites were slightly bitter, with a distinct chocolatiness.

Our office seems to have a thing for nut- and toffee-filled chocolates, which may be why the dark-chocolate Harbor Sweets bunny led the pack in this portion of the testing, too. We were happy to bite through well-balanced dark chocolate and meet the same fillings we enjoyed in Harbor’s milk-chocolate bunny. A slight saltiness in the toffee filling was a nice touch.

In this category, we also liked Jacques Torres’s bunnies, whose high-quality dark chocolate had me going back to our snack table three days after the tasting to break off another ear (sorry, bunny). The Jacques Torres bunnies come in a variety of sizes, making them perfect for snacking or using as showstopping holiday decorations.

Our Favorite Chocolate Eggs (and More)

If you've finished off all your chocolate bunnies and are still craving more sweets, we got you. During our bunny tasting, we came across a few other candies we loved. Of all the very fancy, elaborately painted Easter eggs we sampled, our favorite was the egg variety pack by Veruca, a mixture of small, beautifully decorated milk- and dark-chocolate eggs housed in a slim plastic tube.

For those of us willing to stray a little further from traditional Easter-candy styles—or those, like me, who don’t really know what Easter traditions are—this small wooden gift box, by L.A. Burdick, makes the perfect Easter gift. Wrapped with a dainty bow, the box contains an assortment of fancy, ganache-filled dark-, milk-, and white-chocolate bunnies, various chocolate truffles, and sugar-dusted marzipan eggs. Admittedly, this gift box didn’t make it into our official taste-test results, because...I’d already finished off most of the sweets in it by the day of testing. Whoops.