REVIEW: Butterfinger Salted Caramel

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I’ve always liked the “crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery” vibe of Butterfinger bars. But despite their incomparable texture and delicious flavor, I often forget that they exist.

I’m sorry, Butterfinger bars. You’re always a solid option. I enjoyed your underrated peanut butter cups. When a social media account I follow teased the return of Butterfinger BB’s—only to reveal the announcement as a cruel April Fool’s Day prank—my heart shattered like your flaky candy filling. I’m just too easily lured by the new and exciting, and I take for granted your steadfast presence in the candy aisle.

Butterfinger Salted Caramel, the brand’s first new flavor in ten years, proves that the brand may be steady, but it’s anything but stagnant. When it comes to limited edition novelty flavors, I’ve tried a lot of varieties from more prolific brands, including M&M’s, Kit Kat, and Reese’s. Butterfinger Salted Caramel ranks among the best in recent memory.

The Butterfinger Salted Caramel bar consists of its original crispy, laminated peanut buttery core enrobed in salted caramel-flavored crème coating. The coating smells and tastes like the caramel coating of kettle corn, but mellowed by creaminess.

The salt is the unsung hero of the bar. It makes each bite a sweet and salty lover’s dream: it gives a nice salty zing, it prevents the crème from tasting too sweet, and it enhances the flavor of the core, which I swear tastes even more peanut buttery than the original Butterfinger. The salt in this bar has accomplished more in one bite than I have all week. While the flavor of the caramel itself gets a little lost in all this excitement, the bar maintains a unique sweetness that avoids tasting simply like salty peanut butter.

So, is the Salted Caramel variety better than the original Butterfinger? While it’s hard to beat peanut butter and chocolate as a combination, I’d argue the two bars are close rivals.

Butterfinger Salted Caramel is available for a limited time, now through June. At my local Walmart, the bars were relegated to a far corner of the self-checkout area, almost impossible to see until the last leg of the shopping journey. Maybe, like me, the store failed to fully appreciate Butterfinger, but at least one of us has already learned a lesson.

Purchased Price: $1.34
Size: 1.9 oz (54 g) bar
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 9 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: 260 calories, 11 grams of fat, 5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 150 milligrams of sodium, 39 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 23 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Reese’s PB&J Big Cups

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I’m a big fan of the current Renaissance Reese’s is having these days. It feels like we’ve had more peanut butter cup innovation over the last 12 months than the previous 12 YEARS, and I, for one, am there for it. I have to admit, I’ve had mixed feelings about some of the newer creations, but on the whole, I am just happy for all the new treats.

In addition to some heavy hitters that dropped recently, like the Caramel Big Cup and Red Velvet, we now have PB&J with strawberry and grape flavors! Honestly, the only real surprise is how long it took Reese’s to come out with such a classic peanut butter pairing, especially as we’ve had things like cereal, sugar cookies, and pretzels featured in peanut butter cups. But the wait is over! It’s peanut butter jelly time sans baseball bat.

Let’s start with the grape, if only because it comes first alphabetically.

After opening the package, there is a whiff of chemically grape and then the familiar peanut butter and chocolate combo. That fruity scent almost brings to mind the grape flavor of Big League Chew. I cut the first cup in half to get a view of the inside and was disappointed at the ratio of peanut butter to jelly inside. If this were a sandwich, it would absolutely not pass muster. This is disappointing for two reasons: 1) It throws off the flavor balance in the candy. 2) I KNOW Reese’s can and has done better! The ratio in the recent Chocolate Lava Cup and the aforementioned Caramel Cup was much better.

The chocolate and peanut butter you know and love are the same as you’d expect, with the artificial grape flavor playing a distant third. It tastes very fake when my tongue could pick it up. I even pulled apart the cup to get a better taste, and it was hard to get much flavor, even with a finger swipe of just the sticky purple goop itself. What is there is very reminiscent of grape Kool-aid with a bit too much water mixed with it.

Now, onto the strawberry.

The initial scent upon opening these is oddly both stronger *and* weaker. Stronger in that there’s definitely more there, more present than the grape, weaker in the sense that it smells less like the intended flavor. It’s less of a specifically strawberry fragrance and more of a generically sweet, fruity candy scent. That didn’t bode well.

As with the grape, the strawberry layer is pitifully thin and utterly lacking. Interestingly, it had a stickier consistency though. It reminded me of the squeeze tube-type candy like Ooze Tubes.

Just like with the grape, the flavor was faint and very artificial. It reminded me of mixing green gummy bears into Sprite and letting them sit long enough to start dissolving. It was like someone turned down the flavor without turning down the sweetness.

All in all, both flavors are good for peanut butter cups but really weak if you’re specifically looking for peanut butter AND JELLY cups.

Purchased Price: $3.19 each
Size: 2.8 oz
Purchased at: CVS (Grape), Cumberland Farms (Strawberry)
Rating: 5 out of 10 (both)
Nutrition Facts: (1 cup) 190 calories, 10 grams of total fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 105 milligrams of sodium, 24 grams of total carbs, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 22 grams of total sugar, and 3 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Hershey’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch Kisses

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Cinnamon Toast Crunch has been having a bit of a moment with a host of new-ish to hot-off-the-presses products and flavors (including Strawberry and, if you were lucky/crazy enough to win a recent sweepstakes, a collaboration with TOTINO’S freaking PIZZA).

Hershey’s Kisses is also an iconic snack brand that has recently been flirting with souped-up special editions (Butterbeer, anyone?) So, it might not be surprising to learn that these two powerhouses have gone ahead and teamed up for Cinnamon Toast Crunch Hershey’s Kisses—and if you’re like me, an aficionado of both overly sweet cereal and white crème candy, this is a total dream come true.

I had a good feeling the moment I found these on proud display at Target. The indulgently enormous Share Pack size promises luxurious abundance, and the appealing design of the bag—a crisp white with friendly swirls of star-studded bright green, purple, orange, and blue to mirror the cereal’s box—is a harbinger of the high quality and attention to detail ahead. Even the wrappers, another riff on that psychedelic color palette, are delightful, suggesting much more whimsy than the classic staid silver of the OG Kiss.

I might be establishing a high bar for the candies to live up to, but when I unwrapped my first one, I wasn’t disappointed at all. They’re beautiful little morsels of white crème run through with rich butterscotch-colored stripes, reminiscent of a lighter-colored Hershey’s Hug. Oh yeah, and they smell fantastic! The cinnamon aroma is strong; more specifically, it really does seem like a Cinnamon Toast Crunch aroma, as there’s a slightly-cloying-but-not-quite-overwhelming, powdered sugar-esque sweet undertone that specifically evokes cereal rather than any old cinnamon-y baked good. Clearly, I was extremely pleased with everything I saw and sniffed, so I barely made it two steps past the self-checkout before sneaking a snacking.

They say don’t meet your heroes, but you know what? This flavor actually lived up to all of my expectations, tasting exactly as delicious as it looks and smells. Food science really is magical—if you asked a wizard to conjure up the perfect blend of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Hershey’s Kisses, this is exactly what I imagine they’d poof into existence. (Does Hershey’s have actual wizards working for them? Come to think of it, that would explain the Butterbeer Kisses…)

One more neat touch, which the product image on the packaging exaggerates but which you can’t quite see on an actual Kiss until biting into it, is the crunchy bits on the inside. According to the Hershey’s website, they’re graham-flavored, and while I didn’t immediately identify that (they seemed to me more like a fun textural enhancement with the added bonus of slightly cutting the sweetness), it made sense, doubling as both a satisfying explanation for their more subdued taste and an additional nod to the cereal inspiration.

If you’re the type of Cinnamon Toast Crunch fanatic who’ll have a bowl for breakfast, a Creamy Cinnamon Spread sandwich for lunch, and a Cinnadust-seasoned entrée for dinner, Cinnamon Toast Crunch Hershey Kisses would make the perfect dessert… and even if you like CTC just a normal amount, I promise you’ll still love these. (If you somehow don’t, don’t worry; I’d be happy to take them off your hands.)

Purchased Price: $6.52
Size: 9 oz bag (Share Pack)
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 10 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (7 pieces) 170 calories, 9 grams of fat, 6 grams of saturated fat, 0 gram of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 40 milligrams of sodium, 21 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 17 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Reese’s Peanut Butter Pie Miniature Cups

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If you Google “peanut butter pie,” you’ll see slices of pure luxuriousness—mounds of whipped cream, swirls of creamy peanut butter filling, and, often, a chocolate drizzle or chopped up Reese’s cups for garnish.

It’s hard to imagine recreating the excitement of this no-bake classic in a miniature (!) Reese’s cup, but Reese’s has a trick up its chocolate-stained sleeve, which is peanut butter-flavored chocolate. While the brand has utilized flavored crème confection, including marshmallow, vanilla, red velvet, and, yes, peanut butter, Reese’s Peanut Butter Pie Miniatures are the first to imbue milk chocolate with flavor.

The chocolate shell’s flavor profile is equal parts chocolate and peanut butter, which amounts to Reese’s Cup-flavored chocolate. The chocolate tastes like when you have chewed your Reese’s several times and the peanut butter and chocolate flavors have melded together. When eaten whole, the cup has a slightly more peanut butter-forward taste than your average Reese’s.

While enjoyable, the flavored chocolate is hard to assess. If this were a new candy, I would be thrilled with the result. But the flavored chocolate here felt a little redundant. I didn’t feel like I was tasting something new, so much as I was beginning my familiar Reese’s eating experience at the five-second mark. Given that its namesake pie contains whipped cream or cream cheese, a flavored crème might have made more sense for this product.

It took me a while to work through my dilemma, and once I did, I remembered that Reese’s Peanut Butter Pie Miniatures utilize crunchy graham cookie pieces to represent a graham cracker crust. The crunch of these pieces is hearty (think Teddy Grahams, not graham crackers), but there is no real added flavor. It would have been cool to include a graham cracker layer at the base of the cup, and I plan on testing this hypothesis next time I buy a box of Honey Maid.

The back of the package suggests using Reese’s Peanut Butter Pie Miniatures within a peanut butter pie recipe, just in case there is not enough peanut butter pie in your peanut butter pie. It’s a suggestion I support. The extra crunch in these cups would complement a creamy pie while giving the chef the opportunity to make lame jokes about peanut butter pie inception. While a taste of these Miniatures will quell the craving for chocolate and peanut butter, the buyer’s creativity may yield a more exciting result.

Purchased Price: $5.99
Purchased at: Giant Eagle
Size: 9.6 oz (272 g) bag
Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (per 3 pieces)130 calories, 7 grams of fat, 3 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, less than 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 60 milligrams of sodium, 16 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, 14 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Reese’s Filled Pretzels

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As someone who is allergic to chocolate, I’m used to cries of “You can’t have that. There’s chocolate in it!” when I eat Reese’s Pieces.

“Oh, that’s a common misconception, but there actually isn’t,” I always inform my concerned companions. But, I can tell they never quite believe me, even when I point out the ingredients list on the packaging. As soon as I heard about Reese’s new Filled Pretzels with peanut butter filling, I instinctively prepared myself for more of these conversations.

Of course, I’m happy that this is a new Reese’s treat I can actually eat, but I can imagine it causing confusion in chocolate cravers, and I can’t say I’d blame them. After all, the name “Reese’s” is practically shorthand for “chocolate plus peanut butter,” so it’s surprising that they’d make something with only half of the iconic pairing—especially in the form of a snack where it seems like chocolate would fit right in. Even though it’s what allowed me to eat these, not incorporating chocolate feels like a misstep, which is only my first caveat about these pretzels.

The second is that… they’re just not that exciting. In addition to those mildly awkward Reese’s Pieces memories, they also instantly reminded me of the similarly pouch-like peanut butter-filled pretzels from other brands my parents like to keep on hand for long car rides. I’ve always found those pretzels okay but dry, their crackly exterior and dusty filling leaving me with an unpleasant urge to wash my mouth out, even though their flavor isn’t so bad. As it turns out, Reese’s take isn’t very different.

Since the pretzel is hollow to accommodate its filling (which is actually impressively robust for something so bite-size), it’s extremely thin and crispy, closer to a pretzel crisp than your standard hearty fare. Despite being quite careful, my first small bite shattered the whole thing into about a billion brittle shards! I generally prefer a thicker pretzel, but fine, I can accept that that’s not logistically possible in this format. At least the peanut butter makes up for it, right?

Well, sort of. I wanted so badly for the peanut butter to be creamier, but alas, it’s pretty powdery. It’s probably not too different than what’s in a Reese’s Cup, but since there’s a more concentrated amount here and the taste of the pretzel isn’t rich enough to really complement it, the chalky texture is apparent, and therefore unsatisfying. The peanut butter also tastes noticeably sweet rather than nutty. It’s not bad necessarily, but it’s a tad jarring (I audibly said “OHHHH, THAT EXPLAINS IT” when I noticed powdered sugar was one of the ingredients).

The saving grace for me is the salt. While I’m usually a sweet over salty girl, here it compensates beautifully for the lackluster and slightly uncanny peanut butter, adding extra complexity and cravability. The plump shape also helps, as I never got tired of crunching dramatically into it (I’d definitely recommend that over a more delicate nibbling approach, which would just get messy).

These Reese’s Filled Pretzels are certainly preferable to starving on a road trip, but ultimately, I’d never choose them over a bowl of classic Reese’s Pieces—or even just regular old hard pretzels.

Purchased Price: $5.39
Size: 9 oz bag
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 5 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (per 7 pieces) 130 calories, 6 grams of fat, 240 milligrams of sodium, 17 grams of carbohydrates, 4 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein.

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