Sometimes, life presents small, yet pressing emergencies that must be addressed at once: the printer is out of ink, your car engine’s sputtering fumes, your roommate ate all the popsicles on the first 80-degree day of spring (always share the popsicles!).

These are the everyday, yet highly significant crises, the things that cannot wait for some imagined perfect time on your agenda. And today? That crisis is the craving for peanut butter and chocolate. To ignore this need would be reprehensible, so let us not dilly-dally. Onward! To the snack cake!

I have tried all the snack cakes – the rolls, the crispies, the fluffies, the strange holiday shapies — and, I dare say, this iteration is quite pleasant. While not nouveau or flashy by any means, this humble pastry circle does good on its promise to highlight the cake’s prima donna: chocolate and peanut butter.

Biting in, there’s an ample floof of creamy peanut butter filling much akin to peanut butter-fied frosting from the tub. Surrounding it is a milk chocolate-y coating that’s been drizzled together with peanut butter confection, which has enough nutty, cocoa-y chime to remind me why I shovel Reese’s into my mouth like a Hungry Hippo.

The chocolate portion of the coating is a tad thin, yet quite tasty. Sure, it’s not Ghirardelli by any stretch of the imagination, but it brings flavors of fudge, milk chocolate, chocolate frosting to the fore and, like all the Hostess goods of my youth, combines into an experience that is deliciously familiar and so crammed with sugar, I probably have enough energy to perform Riverdance blindfolded right now.

Now, the cake is another story. Maybe I got a crummy batch, but when it comes to being light and fluffy, this pastry has hitched a one-way ticket on the struggle bus. It’s dense, flavorless, and nothing more than ho-hum. That said, I didn’t expect some extravagant cake straight from the ovens of the Great British Bake-Off, especially when a pack of two is only 50 cents.

The cake’s really just a neutral vehicle to hold all the chocolate and peanut butter together, which it does quite well and for a super inexpensive price. So if, and I’m just thinking ahead, you know, thinking of us, you were to buy, say, 29 packs, it may prove to be one of the best decisions you’ve made in 2018.

If you’ve ever been charmed (understandably) by a Reese’s, these are not going to replace the confection in the chocolate-and-peanut-butta-lovin’ pocket of your soul, but if you’d like a pretty good, no-nonsense snack cake, these are chocolate-y, peanut butter-y, and sturdy enough that you can add ice cream and they will not turn to mush.

Simple and to-the-point, they require little thought other than ripping open a little tag of cellophane and even make a nice breakfast on a Wednesday. And don’t we all deserve a nice breakfast on a Wednesday?

(Nutrition Facts – 2 cakes – 350 calories, 160 calories from fat, 18 grams of fat, 12 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 200 milligrams of sodium, 47 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 36 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: 50 cents
Size: 2-pack
Purchased at: 99-Cent Store
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Chocolate coating. Peanut butter drizzle in coating. Frosting-like peanut butter floof inside. Reason to use “floof” in everyday language. Clogging Riverdance blindfolded.
Cons: Dense, flavorless cake. Could have greater ratio of chocolate coating. Discovering you’re out of printer ink. Roommates who eat all the popsicles without asking.