The Easter season always inspires my memories of the Enchanted Egg. While I can barely remember the story, the image is fixed in my mind, an icon of the spring celebration. It was an exquisitely-decorated egg with a mysterious hole at one end. Peer into the hole, and inside you’d discover an enchanted world of eternal springtime.
The legend of the Enchanted Egg appears to spring from a children’s book of the same name, written by Peggy Burrows in 1956. The cover looks very familiar to me, but the tale has faded into my distant memories.
Richly decorated eggs have been a part of the Easter celebration for centuries. Ukrainian Easter Eggs, called "pysanka" were given as gifts as a symbol of spiritual rebirth. For many years, jewel-encrusted Faberge Eggs were presented by Russian Tsar Alexander III to Empress Maria as an annual Easter gift. Each egg contained a surprise hidden inside.
In the holiday television special, It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, Snoopy picks up an Enchanted Egg in a department store and gazes in. He even leaps into the egg and dances a minuet in a meadow filled with cuddly white bunnies.
When I was a just a youngster, my grandmother Hilda even found us an Enchanted Egg, probably in the local candy and stationary store. It was made of white granulated sugar with squiggly pastel yellow trim. When you looked into the spy-hole you were treated to a bucolic spring scene. We kept it for several years and displayed it every Easter. In elementary school, I even crafted an Enchanted Egg the color of a robin’s egg out of paper Mache in Mrs. Shaw's art class. My mother still displays it each Easter in her home.
I decided to recreate the Enchanted Egg as a cake for our family’s Easter Dinner, decorated with butter cream and fondant. Before you leave, click below to take a peek inside the Enchanted Egg and revel in a sweet and magical melody of spring.
©2008 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved
