How to Pair Easter Candy and Cheese
Easter Cheeseboard
You can pair cheese with pretty much anything. With Easter coming around the corner, we wondered—why haven't we tried pairing Easter candy and cheese? Plush peeps, chewy jelly beans, smooth chocolate bunnies… Easter candy is known for being intensely sweet, and while that may make it tough to pair with wine or beer, it makes for an intriguing canvas for pairing with cheese.
Shannon Bonilla, ACS CCP & CCSE, Wisconsin Licensed Cheesemaker, and Wisconsin Cheese Expert, Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin shares that when it comes to Easter candy, "You can have a lot of fun and get creative by experimenting with unexpected flavor and texture pairings, letting each component shine by either enhancing or contrasting the other. I have become a bit of a proselytizer for chocolate and cheese, so branching into candy and cheese felt like a natural next step." She adds, "The sweetness and acidity in many Easter candies can actually make pairing easier, as they create nice contrast and balance with the richness of the cheese. It opens the door to some really fun and unexpected combinations."
We spoke to cheese experts across the country to find their dream Easter candy and cheese pairings. Some lean into textural contrast, while others aim for a complementary blend of softness and richness.
Cadbury Egg & Cheddar Blue
Cadbury Egg & Red Rock blue cheese and cheddar
Cadbury eggs come in two main forms: one, a chocolate egg with a cream-filled middle, and another, in a mini size with a candy shell leading to rich milk chocolate.
Kellie Freemire, the general manager and cheese buyer at Beautiful Rind cheese club in Chicago, recommends pairing the cream egg with Red Rock by Roelli Cheese Haus, a blue cheese and cheddar mashup with a bright orange color and earthy, savory profile. "Cadbury eggs have a lot of sweetness, and maybe not as much depth," she says. "They'd benefit from another flavor profile to round them out."
As for the mini eggs, Kristine Jannuzzi, Cheese Professor contributor, cheese expert and creator of @nyccheesechick, also envisions a blue—but one that's "soft and spunky." The softness of the blue cheese would contrast with the candy's crispy shell, and the dense, chocolatey interior would balance the blue's sharpness. She recommends Blugin by La Casearia Carpenedo in the Veneto, which is aged in Italian gin, or Blue Jay by Wisconsin's Deer Creek, which the maker calls a "quintuple-cream blue cheese" infused with crushed juniper berries.
Peeps & Fresh Chevre
Peeps & Laura Chenel Goat Cheese
Juliana Uruburu, cheese expert and retail program director at Market Hall Foods talked to her team, and they shared that since peeps are so sugary and sweet with a marshmallow base, they felt a tangy goat milk cheese could counterbalance the sweetness and find a delicious middle ground between the two flavor profiles of sweet and sharp. A peep slathered with fresh chevre? Why not!
Hannah Gershowitz, the founder of Metro Cheese Club and the cheesemonger at Eastern District in Brooklyn, had an opposing idea: pairing the Peep with a long-aged, harder cheese with crunchy tyrosine crystals for texture. Try them with four-year-aged Noord Hollander Gouda, which has notes of caramel and soy sauce.
Jelly Beans & Mild Brick
Jelly Beans & Widmer's Mild Brick
Shannon Bonilla has her eye on one jelly bean in particular for this pairing: the vanilla Jelly Belly. With it, she recommends pairing Widmer's Mild Brick, a soft, lightly tangy cheese that's great for melting. "This one delightfully shocked me," says Shannon Bonilla. "The mellow, buttery tang of mild brick cheese melts into the sweet vanilla and makes it taste like a cheese Danish or glazed breakfast pastry. The vanilla enhances the cheese’s natural dairy sweetness while a touch of salt keeps it perfectly balanced."
Malted Milk Eggs & Gouda
Malted Milk Eggs & OG Kristal
Malted milk eggs have a quintessential toasty, malted flavor and a crunchy yet airy texture. Uruburu felt the key to this pairing is the maltiness from the malted eggs, which provides a toasty flavor, and recommends an aged Gouda like OG Krystal or Beemster XO, which would provide a complex background of sweet, sharp, nutty, and salty flavors that would love to be paired with a malted chocolate egg.
Kellie Freemire sees milk eggs as a more mild, approachable candy that still delivers on depth. For her, that makes them a great pairing with an earthy tomme like the Cumberland Tomme from Sequatchie Cove, which has a buttermilk tang and a rich, earthy flavor of mushrooms and nuts.
Chocolate Bunny & Blue
Chocolate Bunny & Treasure Cave
For Shannon Bonilla, there was only one answer for pairing cheese with a chocolate bunny—and that's pairing it with a blue. "Blue cheese and chocolate just work," she says. She recommends the blue cheese wedge from Treasure Cave. "The creamy, slightly crumbly blue melts into the smooth chocolate, and instead of just balancing sweetness, it transforms it. The salt sharpens the cocoa, the cocoa softens the tang, and suddenly both taste deeper, richer, and more complex."