Perfectly Imperfect Chocolate-Covered Peanut Butter Eggs

Smoke in the air and lumps in the eggs. But we carry on despite it all.

The past few weeks have felt a little bit like living in someone else’s nightmare.

My country is embroiled in another illegal and tragic war. I’m sitting up late at night paying taxes that feel like they’ll go straight to bombing a girl’s school. Oil prices are skyrocketing, basic food is getting ever more expensive, and worse times are seemingly on the horizon. It’s hard to keep up with the news without feeling like I’m having a panic attack. Everyone in our household has been operating with stress turned up to eleven, wondering what terrible thing will happen next.

So with Easter around the corner, I decided to make something frivolous. Something fun, healthyish, crafted from pantry ingredients that cost little to replenish. A treat that was low consumption, the perfect addition to my almost 3-year-old’s Easter basket, stocked with biodegradable raffia easter grass and dutifully thrifted vintage fillable eggs. I decided I would make some homemade chocolate-covered peanut butter eggs.

I gathered my supplies, visited two stores to track down the white chocolate chips for my chocolate-hating child, and started cooking. Visions of competent motherhood danced in my head. Maybe I would make these every year. They could become one of my signature creations, the way I so fondly remembered the train-shaped cakes my mother made when I was little, and her perfect gingerbread houses. My toddler and I mixed the filling and rolled it into egg shapes, licking the peanut butter off our hands when we were done before I put them into the freezer to chill.

We went to bed and read bedtime stories until he fell asleep, teeth brushed, clean pajamas on, angelic-looking as always. I lay there next to him for a long time, the baby in my arms, imagining how much fun we were going to have the next day, how beautiful the eggs would be. Everything was unfolding exactly as I had envisioned it. A rare glimpse of serenity amid the chaos.

I was feeling so smug when I got the eggs out of the freezer the next day. They looked exactly how I imagined they would, egg shaped, the right size, less lumpy than I initially feared. When I started dipping them it seemed like it was working—the chocolate stuck, a smooth, even layer building as I turned.

That’s when disaster struck. I tried to rotate the eggs to cover all the exposed peanut butter filling, and the white chocolate began sticking to my fingers like crazy glue. Everything I did made it worse, the butter knife snagging as I tried to spackle the surface smooth, wet fingers not sliding off the surface like I hoped but instead snagging even more seriously, pockmarking the already stucco-rough chocolate.

As I dithered over those first few eggs, the reserved white chocolate on the stove had hardened, and I turned the flame on low to remelt it. I swear I turned my back for one second and all of a sudden it was a burned and sodden lump of black and white.

The air smelled like burning. My toddler was tugging at my leg, letting me know he was ready for dinner. The baby in the carrier, sensing a disturbance in the force, woke from her peaceful slumber and began to squawk.

My husband rushed into the room, sure we were all in the middle of some kind of emergency, and saw me holding a lumpy chocolate pastel egg, tears in my eyes, and as we looked at each other a funny thing happened: We laughed. For the first time all day, maybe all week, we laughed until our cheeks hurt at the absurdity of it all. Because that’s just life right now, isn’t it? Smoke in the air and lumps in the eggs. Carrying on despite it all. And you know what? Those lumpy eggs tasted great.

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

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