Chocolate for Easter at the London Museum

What to do with the kids at Easter?

Chocolate and sugar candies are hardy perennials. Show me a child who doesn’t like chocolate! or who doesn’t have a sweet tooth! But the Museum of London in Docklands takes a rather different approach to the subject from the usual treasure hunt, showing the ways sugar has affected the world economy.

“London, sugar and slavery” shows how there’s a very bitter aftertaste to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain’s love affair with sweeties. Now, perhaps, we have a chance to make amends by backing fair trade producers.

There’s a free chocolate tasting on 12 and 13 April, but you do need to book ahead for these events (on 020 7001 984). Other events include historical re-enactments of London trades, and a chance to make a spice bag.

From 10-14 April, adults can get in for free. Children get in free all year.

If you want to take a more mature and sybaritic approach to chocolate, you might want to head to L’Artisan du Chocolat, in Selfridges on Oxford Street. If you want one of the one-metre high, 25 kg eggs, you’ll end up paying through the nose – but the present I want is a Flashbunny. It’s an Easter Bunny, but not as we know it – the Flashbunnies are all decorated in bright day-glo colours, and cost ten quid.

What really amazed me is the bright neon yellow and red aren’t wrappings or paint – they’re made of coloured cocoa dust, which is applied to the outside of the chocolate rabbit and gives it soft velvety ‘fur’. Almost (but not quite) too good to eat!

On Easter Saturday, at exactly 3 pm, Artisan du Chocolat staff will smash up one of the 25 kg eggs – and then give all the pieces away to children (including big kids, like you and me). Definitely worth heading towards Selfridges on Saturday if you have a sweet tooth!

Photo by Eleanor Georgia on flickr