Even Paris’ Easter Candy Is Stylish and Tantalizing

Every Easter, the master chocolatiers of France compete to design the year’s most artistic and original chocolate eggs, American-style bunnies, church bells (the French version of the Easter Bunny), hens, and other gourmet tokens of the springtime holiday. Here’s a short roundup of some of this year’s most sophisticated Parisian chocolate designs for Easter 2016.

Designer Pierre Tachon put the chicken before the egg with Cocotte (top) a stylized geometric chocolate hen filled with almond-praline egg bonbons for superstar French chef Alain Ducasse’s chocolate company. The collection also included an equally sculptural chocolate egg that resembles turned wood.

French chocolatier Jacques Genin collaborated with artist Corinne Jam to create “Tanabata,” a series of shiny dark chocolate handpainted Easter eggs (with an Easter Bunny to match).

French chocolatier Jean-Paul Hévin covered his Easter egg with colorful candy buttons and sat a hen atop a traditional French Easter bell.

Pastry chef Patrick Pailler of Fauchon branched out from the routine cast of bunnies and bells to invent a cerebral chocolate tangram puzzle based on the Chinese game. Here, a series of chocolate pieces in a box are meant to be played with and assembled to form endless shapes (before possibly melting on your fingers before they make it to your mouth).

And this year Belgian chocolatier Pierre Marcolini created a milk chocolate version of the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then went off-topic to include the Cheshire Cat and more characters from the literary classic, to create an intriguing set of edible figurines with multigenerational appeal.