Let loose in a chocolate store with 25 children, Rosita Boland meets the Easter Bunny
It's the smell that hits you first. A sweet, intense smell that 25 children from Leinster Park Montessori School in Harold's Cross, Dublin, have no difficulty in recognising instantly. "Chocolate!" they cry the minute they step inside the door of the Chocolate Warehouse. The children are all aged between two and five, and some of them are rubbing their hands together with excitement as they stand there sniffing the air, keen to locate the source of that tantalising smell.
You may have thought the Easter Bunny visited only pastoral locations, ears flapping, hopping between beflowered gardens and rolling fields. However, in the run-up to Easter, the same creature can also be seen in an industrial estate in Dublin's Walkinstown, starring in the Chocolate Warehouse's Easter exhibition, which features quite a lot of the brown stuff.
"We've had thousands of kids through here," says director Natasha Caffrey.
The Caffrey chocolate factory is next door, and the warehouse tours were set up in response to requests to visit the factory. The Caffrey factory supplies the warehouse with most of its exhibits and shop products. The Chocolate Warehouse has been doing tours for four years; themed ones for Christmas and Easter and a workshop visit in the summer, during which children are given a chance to try making chocolate.
After sniffing the air, the second thing the children do is stare. The interior of the warehouse is very busy. If you could ever describe a place as being cluttered with chocolate, this is definitely it. There are eggs of all sizes, hundreds of them; on shelves, hanging from the ceiling, on top of cupboards, on the floor, in baskets. Some are for sale, some are for decoration.
There are rows of chocolate rabbits. Every time I look, there seems to be more, but well, that's what rabbits are famous for. There are trees with scores of lollipops hanging off them.
"The Easter Bunny comes out and waters the trees each night to make the lollipops grow," Caffrey tells the children brightly.
They look at her suspiciously: the Easter Bunny they know delivers chocolate. They don't think of him as also being a gardener.
"Where is the Easter Bunny?" one child pipes up.
The tour starts along a walkway called an Easter Parade. There are several different Easter-themed tableaux made of chocolate; painting eggs; hunting for eggs; an egg kingdom; egg houses, egg forests. One small boy says, glassy-eyed: "I've never seen so much chocolate in my life."
All the exhibits are behind green plastic chicken-wire.
"We had to put the fencing up," Caffrey confides, "because we found the children were getting excited and eating the exhibits."
At the end of the walkway, the Easter Bunny, all six foot of him, resplendent in a white furry suit, sits in an armchair. He greets the children and presents each one with an egg. This to them is the real business; getting hold of chocolate for their own consumption.
There is a wishing-well full of scraps of paper with names on them: the children are invited to write their name on a bit of paper and make a wish.
"I wished that I had my pirate bed tomorrow instead of waiting for the summer," Cathal McCabe says cryptically.
The people in the Caffrey's factory next door have made all the chocolate exhibits, and they seem to have had fun with the final exhibit. It's a factory-type scene with two real working chocolate pumps, which fascinate the children. There are also a few dummies sitting round a table, presumably off-duty from toiling at the pumps. One is playing a life-sized chocolate guitar and the others are playing cards round a table, gambling for chocolate money.
Afterwards, when the children have had their names piped on their eggs, they do a post-mortem on the tour.
"I thought the Easter Bunny was supposed to be brown," says Alannah Grady. "And I thought he was small."
"I thought he was going to be white - and he was! And he has lovely pink furry ears," croons Valerie Gilhooley.
"I didn't like that big bunny rabbit," declares Brian Kelly, making a face. "I didn't like him at all."
"But you like your Easter egg, don't you?" demands Cathal McCabe, anxious to get his classmate's priorities right. "You don't like the bunny, but you like the egg he gave you?"
There seems to be no doubt about that. Whatever about the appearance of the Chocolate Warehouse's Easter Bunny, none of the Leinster Park contingent has any qualms at all about the merits of the gifts he dispensed.
The Chocolate Warehouse is at Mulcahy's Industrial Estate, Greenhills Road, Walkinstown, Dublin. Last Easter tour is today, 8 per child. 01-4500080