Peeps

Corn Syrup
Sugar and other ingredients used to be combined with the gummy extract of the Althaea officinalis, or marshmallow, to make a sweet, spongy treat. Nowadays, sugar is mixed with corn syrup to make the fluffy guts of these puffy poultry.

Gelatin
Protein derived from animal skins, tendons, ligaments, and/or bones (in the form of hydrolyzed collagen) allows these chicks to keep their shape, even when they’re heated in the microwave. (Try it. It’s amazing.)

Carnauba Wax
The little eyeballs that seem to stare at you accusingly just before you chomp on them are made of this substance, which is excreted by a Brazilian palm tree.

Cadbury Creme Egg

Milk Chocolate
See the various ingredients in the chocolate bunny.

Yellow 6
The yolk gets its brilliant color from an azo dye built around double-bonded nitrogen atoms. Yellow 6 also helps give Kraft Macaroni & Cheese its rich golden hue.

Egg Whites
The white inside this ersatz egg actually contains the real thing. A mix of several proteins, half of which is ovalbumin, it’s likely used to make a sticky, meringue-like foam.

Calcium Chloride
This sidewalk de-icer is also used to coagulate soybeans into tofu and milk into cheese curds. Here, it probably helps whiten and solidify the crème.

Chocolate Easter Bunny

Cocoa Mass
What you get when you grind the center of the cacao bean, called the nib, into a thick liquid. Also known as unsweetened chocolate or chocolate liquor.

Sugar
We’ve been cutting the bitterness of cacao with sucrose cane extract since the 16th century.

Milk Ingredients
In 1875, Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter mixed cocoa with Henri Nestlé’s condensed milk formula for babies and made this semiplastic solid. By law, US milk chocolate must contain at least 12 percent milk solids.

Cocoa Butter
The fatty part of the cacao bean. It melts at human mouth temperature, transporting the chocolate flavor across the taste buds and providing some people with proof that there really is a God.

Soy Lecithin
A blend of phospholipids that acts as an emulsifier, keeping the other ingredients from separating.