Handmade sugar Easter eggs turn tradition into generosity

Every year, Maryanne Statton creates Easter eggs made from sugar, donating them to Jessica’s House, Ronald McDonald House and the London Children’s Hospital.

By Dan Rolph

Holidays like Easter are times when many find joy in the traditions that have been passed down through generations.

Whether it’s eating fish and chips on Good Friday, hunting for Easter eggs or getting excited for the Easter Bunny to visit with treats, those traditions can shape the holiday experience and make it a little more joyful.

Maryanne Statton, 82, is keeping a uniquely delicate and eye-catching Easter tradition alive.

Statton, a retired teacher who grew up on a farm in the Exeter area and now lives in London, creates eggs from sugar every Easter, forming shells out of the sugar and designing intricate scenes within them before sealing them with icing, leaving only a single small hole through which the scenes can be viewed.

Those creations are known as panoramic Easter eggs, a centuries-old tradition that is thought to date back at least to Victorian England, though its origins are still debated today.

For Statton, the exact origins of the craft don’t particularly matter. Her love of the craft stems from the Peggy Burrows children’s book “The Enchanted Egg,” which tells the tale of a yellow duckling who finds a mysterious colourful egg in a meadow. Inside that egg, the duckling discovers a window to a picturesque scene of knights, princesses and castles.

To this day, Statton keeps a copy of that children’s book in her home, serving as a reminder of where it all started.

“It’s from the heart,” said Statton. “That’s what’s important.”

Statton and her mother, Alma Lostell, picked up the craft in the 1970s. While Lostell was teaching crocheting in London, she met a woman who was teaching cake decorating. With Statton’s love for “The Enchanted Egg” already deeply set in her heart, Statton asked her mother to learn the craft — and she did.

Statton would watch from the chesterfield as her mother was taught the intricacies of creating the eggs, picking up on the process herself. Though her mother died in 2009 at the age of 100, Statton has continued to keep that tradition alive.

Since picking up the craft about 50 years ago, almost nothing has changed in Statton’s process.

She begins working long before she even starts making the eggs. Using copies of art she has gathered over the years from wrapping paper, greeting cards and stickers, she cuts out each

piece by hand with minuscule scissors, going as far as to create frayed edges that resemble fur on bunnies.

Around Christmas, Statton starts creating the eggs themselves with plastic moulds — ones that she has held onto over the years, unable to find newer ones of such a durable high quality.

After mixing sugar and an egg white together, she packs that mixture into the moulds and allows them to dry for several hours. Once the shells have dried, Statton removes them from the moulds, revealing that they’ve become hardened shells with a terracotta-like texture and ring.

Using a piping bag and royal icing made with meringue powder and icing sugar, Statton cements the art she’s prepared for the inner scenes into each egg, folding them to create a three-dimensional effect and placing each piece into the shells with tweezers.

The beauty of each egg isn’t limited to those scenes, as Statton then seals the eggs with the icing, decorating them with flowers and leaves that are also formed from coloured icing.

Despite being made almost entirely of sugar, the eggs can last for decades — Statton herself displays eggs that were made about 50 years ago on the shelves of cabinets in her home, nestled next to family photographs and antiques. Though the colours may have faded since those eggs were made, they’re otherwise as sturdy as ever.

But creating the eggs isn’t Statton’s only tradition for Easter. Once they’re made, she donates them to London’s Children’s Hospital, bringing a little extra Easter joy to the children being treated there, just as her mother did before her.

This year, Statton wanted to spread that joy even further, donating many of her meticulously crafted eggs to Ronald McDonald House in London and Jessica’s House in Exeter — a place dear to Statton’s heart.

With an eye on the future, Statton said she’s passing her craft on to the next generation in her family. She’s already taught her niece the basics of creating the eggs, and she plans to continue those lessons.

In every egg she carefully seals, Statton preserves not only a centuries‑old craft, but a legacy of kindness, imagination and tradition meant to be shared.