Last year Hershey’s introduced some new Whoppers, twists on the classic chocolate covered malted milk ball (well, in the case of Whoppers, they’re mockolate). For some reason my area in Southern California is a vast maltless wasteland, so I had to pick up these Reese’s Peanut Butter version of Whoppers in Dublin, CA as I returned from the Bay Area last weekend.

I love the use of the little milk cartons for Whoppers (and Milk Duds, though sadly those have turned mockolate as well), it’s a great way to package a product to stand up, be dispensed and then closed.

The new Whoppers Reese’s Peanut Butter Flavored Candy are basically a peanut butter confectionery coating made of defatted peanuts & partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. (Think of the inside of Reese’s Pieces.)

The inside of the Whoppers is just as I’d hoped, a light honeycomb crisp with a malty flavor.

Whoppers are a bit smaller than the usual malted milk balls found in bulk bins, which are usually about the diameter of a quarter. These little Whoppers (hard to call them that when I’ve just said that they’re small, now isn’t it) are about the size of a hazelnut.

The outside is a little waxy, but definitely peanutty. It’s not terribly sweet and does eventually do something akin to melting. But the best part is the crumbly, sweet and malty center.

It’s a nice addition to the line, but I think I’ll stick with the Trader Joe’s version (see this post from June 4 Bellies) which is not only bigger but has real milk chocolate on top of that. But if I were to stumble across these as an option at the movies, I’d certainly go for it, the combo with popcorn would be pretty fabulous.

Related Candies

1. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
2. Whoppers Sno-Balls
3. Brach’s Fiesta Eggs
4. Naked Chocolate Maltballs
5. Bulk Balls
6. Cocoa Pete’s Maltimus Maximus

It sounds great. Reese’s Select Clusters feature Peanuts, Pecans, Peanut Butter and Caramel wrapped in Milk Chocolate. It’s like a peanut butter turtle.

Reese’s Signatures line is supposed to fancy up the standard Hershey’s fare, like the Bliss line is doing for their regular chocolate pieces. They were announced last fall at All Candy Expo and last I heard were supposed to come out late this summer. Imagine my delight seeing them at CVS over the weekend. Imagine my shock seeing myself pay $4.29 for a half a pound of Hershey’s!

The clusters are individually wrapped in a pleasant orange, maroon & mango colored wrapper. Each chocolate is a bit different in shape, but they’re mostly a half ounce each and mostly 1.5” in diameter. The little zig zags in the chocolate shell give them a rather handcrafted artisan look. The lumpy exterior teases that there may be real pecans in there. Each piece contains approximately 75 calories.

Biting into it, it’s rather soft. Unlike a turtle that has nuts and caramel to work through, these “nuts” are not quite abundant and certainly not whole - think chunky peanut butter. The caramel reservoir is centered under the little dome, a peanut butter layer with some nuts mixed in. The peanut butter is a bit salty, which balances the sweetness of the milk chocolate and caramel. The caramel is far too gooey and without any actual flavor of its own ... no buttery component, not burnt sugar flavors.

I thought maybe I was just not keen on the texture, so I froze a few. Instead of making a chewy caramel, I just made some sort of similarly tasteless toffee. The peanut butter remained soft and salty, but the caramel bit just never developed a chew, it was like hard candy.

They’re simply not a cluster. I consider a cluster to be something that has distinct items clumped together. In the case of a confection, I expect to be able to discern each of those items. I never really got any sense of pecan in this whole thing ... and come to think of it, I didn’t get much caramel.

It’s appealing, but not something that I’ve found myself reaching for. (I have, however, been reaching for the dark chocolate Bats.) Rebecca at Sugar Hog also found them early and has a review (and paid far less then I did, grrr.).

The list of ingredients is exhaustingly long. The chocolate is real but contains both corn syrup solids & PGPR, the caramel contains high fructose corn sweetener and the whole thing is noted to have less than 2% of pecans. It also lists that it contains macadamia nuts & almonds (though much farther down on that less than 2% less). They call it Select but I don’t think it means selective. (Also, unlike most other Reese’s products, these are not Kosher.)

The final thing to note from the package: Reese’s Select Clusters were made in Mexico. These must be the first items coming off the lines for the American market. While it’s not a replacement for a product that we’re accustomed to from the US factories (so I can’t do a one-for-one comparison like so many folks do with American Coca-Cola & Mexican Coca-Cola).

Many folks have expressed dismay (and outrage) about the closing of the Oakdale, CA Hershey’s plant and have said that you’ll never buy another Hershey’s product because they’ve opened factories in Mexico. Contrary to some rumors, Hershey’s is not moving all production out of the United States (in fact, one of the greatest losses of jobs was not in the US but was in Canada at the Smith Falls, Ontario factory which employed 400 people directly.)

Here’s a statement from Hershey’s:

The Hershey Company is making changes to our global manufacturing network to ensure that our company remains competitive in the global marketplace for the long term. When these changes are completed, 90 percent of the items that Hershey sells in the United States and Canada will continue to be made in these countries.

And we will continue to make HERSHEY’S milk chocolate bars, HERSHEY’S KISSES milk chocolates and REESE’S Peanut Butter Cups as well as a wide range of other products in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

So if anyone wants to send a message to Hershey’s about their restructuring, an idea to consider is to continuing buying the candies made in the USA (it’s very clearly marked on the package) and eschew the Mexican produced ones. A complete boycott abandons the remaining American workers.

If this is an important issue for you, then I also encourage folks to look at the origin of all of your candy. Many “American” products are not made here. A few examples: Wrigley’s LifeSavers (Canada); Nestle Chunky (Brazil) & Wonka Gobstoppers (Mexico) and Starburst Jelly Beans (Mexico).

The reason I probably won’t be buying the Reese’s Select Clusters is purely because they weren’t good enough to warrant that price. Perhaps the name Select and Signatures set the bar too high (oh, and the tease that there were actually pecans in there). If this was just promoted as a new version of Reese’s cups, I would probably be more amenable. But for $7 to $9 a pound I’m more likely to splurge on some See’s Pecan Buds (okay, those are $15 a pound). And for an everyday treat, a simple Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup or for a more textured treat: Take 5 (really, this is just a Take 5 without the pretzel!).

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3. Nestle Turtles
4. Russell Stover Organic Pecan Delight
5. GooGoo Cluster
6. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews

One of the items teased at the September 2007 All Candy Expo was the series of The Dark Knight (Batman) tie in products. As the Indiana Jones Mars products (Mint Crisp M&Ms & Snickers Adventure Bar) found their way onto the shelves about 6-8 weeks in advance of the movie release, I was keeping a close watch for the new Reese’s & KitKat products in the past weeks.

The Limited Edition line features:

I found the bags of the medallions at Target yesterday. They also had the Reese’s Pieces, but frankly, different colored RP just weren’t distinctive enough to get me to buy them. A new proportion of chocolate and peanut butter and the further enticement of dark chocolate is enough to get me to buy them, though.

The Reese’s Dark Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bats bag is a rich chocolate brown, setting it apart from the regular Reese’s orange offerings (though it has that signature orange on the wrapper as an accent).

There’s also some sort of a sweepstakes thing going on where you can Find the bat-signal and win instantly but there was no game piece in either bag so I’m left to wonder how this thing works. (If it’s not a regular game piece that you open to find out if you’ve won, then what prevents someone from going through all the bags at the store and peeking through the little “window” in the package to see if there is a winning game piece?)

The dark ones are just shy of 1.75 inches in length and a little over 1 inch across and a half an inch tall. They weigh about 10 grams each (a regular Reese’s Miniature Peanut Butter Cup is about 9 grams).

I assume that these are absolutely fresh, and have an expiry date of April 2009. However, the sheen of the chocolate was slightly greasy, as Reese’s products usually are. (The exception is pretty much the Fresh from the Factory cups.) The bag smells like dark roasted peanuts.

The chocolate is very soft, so the whole thing has a mellow fudgy bite to it. It melts quickly, rather slick on the tongue but pretty smooth. The peanut butter filling, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of Reese’s peanut butter center you’d expect. A little sandy in texture, a bit salty and sweet.

The dark chocolate is actually bitter, so there’s a whole mix of flavors here - sweet, salt and bitter plus the textures of the chocolate and light crunch of the rough peanut butter.

It’s a great combination and really refreshing. The proportions here are weighted heavily towards the dark chocolate (which isn’t really “dark” as it has milk fat in it), much more than the previous regular-sized Limited Edition Reese’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups.

The foil wrapper is also very appealing; it’s a bronzy brown around the sides and the top has the Reese’s logo and bat logo.

There’s a strange molding anomaly on them, just about all that I unwrapped had little bubbles on either end of the top. (I opened quite a few, looking for a pristine one for the photo, then finding this to be the norm, photographed it.)

Rating: 9 out of 10

The little oval medallion has the stylized bat-signal symbol molded into the top of each piece. Yes, the logo on these is a little different. As with most continuations of classic franchises, the bat-signal has evolved. The original was not an actual bat, but Batman & his cape ... at some point them omitted his head. Back in the old TV show days and the first few movies it looked like this which was pretty consistent with the TV series emblem.

But just as superheroes change their costumes, the logo became more angular and lost some of its bat-ness and wing fringes. (To me it looks more like a car logo now.)

The Reese’s Milk Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bats are simply tasty. They’re everything you’d expect in a flattened Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Miniature. The chocolate is sweet and pretty mellow but has a slight cool feeling on the tongue. The peanut butter center is immediately salty, squishy and has the dark roasted flavors of peanuts & a sandy texture.

There’s less peanut butter, so fans of the peanut part and not the chocolate part should probably stick with the original or seek out the single serve size Bats (I haven’t found those yet).

Rating: 8 out of 10

Overall, this is a good tie in. I like the use of dark chocolate on a tried-and-true favorite. I also like that they tried a new shape instead of just tossing some different foil on the regular minis. (Of course then it just makes us sadder when they go away.) The proportions on the milk chocolate just didn’t have the same appeal as the regular minis or the larger eggs - but I’m sure some other folks will find them to be their ideal version.

Anyone found the large sized bats yet?

Related Candies

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2. Elvis Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cup
3. KitKat Mint Dark Chocolate Minis
4. Darth M&Ms
5. Bleached Reese’s

They’re the candies that made E.T. famous: Reese’s Pieces. Little sweet nuggets of peanut flavored candy covered in a colorful shell. Loved across the universe, they were introduced in 1978, but didn’t break out as a widely-known candy until being featured as alien-bait in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982.

The story is quite familiar to most movie and confectionery fans. Steven Spielberg approached M&Ms about doing a product placement (not a very common thing in those days) in his new movie about a child who adopts an abandoned alien. M&Ms turned down the project, so Spielberg went to his next choice, Hershey’s and the Hershey’s Kiss. Hershey’s wasn’t keen on that, but did offer up one of their new candies that they’d been trying to launch national since 1980, Reese’s Pieces ... which look an awful lot like M&Ms! Sales improved drastically and the idea of product placement was cemented as a way to increase revenue in feature films and television series.

Are they a Halloween candy? Well, the movie takes place around Halloween and they do sport festive harvest colors.

While Reese’s Pieces may sport the Reese’s name, but they’re really not much like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, except that they contain peanuts.

It’s a sweet, melty peanutty center covered in a crisp candy shell. They come in three colors: orange, yellow and brown. They also come in an Easter version that has a pastel shell and is larger.

The center is made from a peanut powder of sorts, instead of a peanut butter. Much of the peanut oil has been removed, mostly because of a manufacturing problem with peanut oil ... it’s a liquid a room temperature, so it tends to migrate out of peanut butter via osmosis when coated with lower-fat things like a sugar shell. (Some folks may notice that their Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups get a little shiny spot in the center of the shell when this happens.)

I find that Reese’s Pieces lack a big nutty punch. They taste like peanuts, but don’t have that real peanut taste that a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup has. They’re also really sweet and don’t have that little salty hit that most other peanut things like Payday Bars, RPBC and Pearson’s Nut Roll have. I’ve always noticed a bit of a floral note to them as well, that just doesn’t do anything for me.

I keep thinking I’ll like them, then I buy them and I’m disappointed. The Easter versions, with its thicker shell and more concentrated “peanut butter as cookie dough” flavor pleases me a lot more. I’m wondering as well if I’m imagining that the shells used to be more consistent. These seemed a little bumpier, a little less opaquely colored.

Related Candies

1. Reese’s Whipps
2. M&M and Reese’s Pieces Peanut Butter Eggs
3. Trader Joe’s Mini Peanut Butter Cups
4. Peanut Butter Kisses
5. Reese’s Pieces with Peanuts

Oh, disappointment.

I had high hopes for the Reese’s Whipps bar. The bar goes something like this: light and fluffy peanut butter flavored nougat wrapped in a layer of peanut butter then coated in mockolate. Okay, I’m not completely certain it is mockolate, as the ingredients include chocolate, but it’s so low on the list, I have my doubts. Especially since they don’t list it as part of the description of the bar and say that this element is “Made with Smooth Chocolate.” Whether it is or not is immaterial because it’s flaky and not that good.

The bar is hefty at 1.9 ounces, just a little smaller than a 3 Musketeers (2.12 ounces) and wrapped in that unmistakable Reese’s orange.

A little blue triangle in the corner heralds that this bar has 40% less fat*. That * leads to the disclaimer that it contains 9 grams of fat versus 15 grams of fat for the average leading chocolate candy brands. I really want to know what they consider the leading chocolate candy brands, which I’m guessing are M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers and Hershey Bars. The bar itself has 230 calories. But I’ll rant about that more a bit later.

The bar looks just like the wrapper promises. It smells lightly sweet and peanutty. The bite on the bar is soft, not stiff. The nougat inside has an immediate peanut butter flavor to it with a little salt and a kind of molasses darkness.

The peanut butter layer around that gives a little extra peanutty zazz to it. The mockolate adds nothing. It gives no chocolatey contribution to the thing, no creamy component, no milky, buttery texture. It merely contains the other two elements, that are actually pretty good. The only good thing about the glaze is that it’s used sparingly ... it’s ultra thin. You could probably shine a light through it.

Yes, with a good coating of real chocolate (like a 3 Musketeers), this could have been a standout bar.

But I guess my real disappointment is that they’ve grabbed a play from the book of 3 Musketeers and are calling it “lower in fat” without mentioning on the front that it contains pretty much the same number of calories as any other candy bar. I’ve made a little list of the size, calories and caloric density of the leading bars, arranged with the least dense at the top. Pay careful attention to the number of calories though, even if it’s not dense, it’s certainly big:

Candy Bar…..............size in grams….calories/cals per gram
York Peppermint Pattie…....39 grams…................140/3.59
3 Musketeers…..............60.4 grams…..............260/4.30
Reese’s Whipps…............53 grams…................230/4.34
M&Ms Peanut…...............49 grams…................220/4.49
Butterfinger…..............60 grams…................270/4.50
Snickers…..................58.7 grams…..............280/4.77
Reese’s Crispy Crunchy…....48 grams…................230/4.79
KitKat ......................43 grams…................210/4.88
Twix…......................57 grams…................280/4.91
Hersey’s Milk Chocolate…...60 grams…................300/5.00
M&Ms Milk Chocolate .........48 grams…................240/5.00
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups…51 grams…................260/5.10

It’s pretty clear that the York Peppermint Pattie is the candy to have if you want straight carbs (no fat, no protein). 3 Musketeers does pretty well as does the Whipps, but remember, if there’s no fat and no protein it’s all sugars. While I find sugar to be wonderful, straight sugar doesn’t really provide much long-lasting satisfaction if you’re looking for a snack that’s a treat.

That chart means nothing if you don’t actually like the candy bar though. And this bar proves that Hershey’s does not need the FDA to change the definition of chocolate, they’re free to make a substandard product and try to sell it to us. Yeah, I’m probably been pretty harsh, but this could have been a really good bar.

Shopping Jen found these at WalMart already and has a review posted here. I also saw these this weekend at Walgreen’s (at two for a dollar!), so they’re in the wild now.

Related Candies

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2. What Made Hershey’s Want to Change Chocolate?
3. Reese’s Crispy Crunchy Bar
4. Head-to-Head: Butterfinger vs. 5th Avenue

Music may be called ear candy at times, but it really doesn’t intersect with candy much. I’m not sure why, they’re easy to enjoy together, though candy always won out for my spending money as a kid. (I owned very little music as a teen, the only singles I remember buying were Blondie’s Call Me & John Lennon’s Starting Over, instead I just listened to whatever albums were in the house, hence my love of the Beatles and The Who.)

Besides the Charleston Chew, which is named after a dance and song, I don’t think there are many music-themed candy bars out there. Even though there’s not much proof of concept, Hershey’s has high hopes for their limited edition Elvis Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Cream Cups. The early announcement of them last year sent quite a wave of enthusiasm through the internet, especially blogs where people were searching desperately. They are slated to go on sale in advance of the 30th anniversary of his death on July 7th.

The cups showed up earlier this year on eBay, as merchants where were given preview cups to try before they buy sold them off for a quick buck or two. (Some were going as high as $5.00 a piece.) I’ll admit that I bid on a few. As luck would have it, the same contact at Hershey’s who sent me the Fresh From The Factory Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups came through last week with these beauties. A whole tin filled with the Big Cup (King Size!) Elvis-themed cups.

The packaging for this variety features Hawaiian Elvis, sporting sideburns and a purple lei. The back of the package features trivia about Elvis: “Priscilla Ann Beaulieu was 14 years old when she met Elvis Presley.” Ah, give the young girls something to aspire to. (Other packages mention his record sales and movie career.) None mentioned the King’s love of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, the progenitor for this candy.

The cups smell like roasted peanuts with a slight sweet tinge of chocolate. Before biting into them, there’s really no indication that they’re different. The Big Cups are pretty hefty, and after eating the smaller-than-normal Fresh From the Factory Cups, I feel rather huge.

Once I bit into them though, the banana-ness was apparent. It’s a soft and floral banana taste in a “banana cream” that’s rather firm, kind of like a banana white chocolate, but not as smooth. The label lists banana flakes as an ingredient. (As well as artificial flavor and artificial color.)

I tried these several ways. I ate them fresh out of the package, I tried them frozen and I tried them a gooey melted mess after letting them sit under the hot studio light. Frozen the banana lacks zing, but of course the texture is great. At room temperature, the banana has a nice mellow flavor. At body temperature the banana cream gets really thick and creamy and tastes a lot more like banana.

I was kind of hoping that they’d use the model of the Caramel Cup and just make the caramel banana flavored. The cream is interesting and carries the flavor well over the very strong peanut butter. All I can say is that it works for me. I don’t know if I’d buy these instead of the regular Reese’s, but I’m curious what the miniatures are going to be like and I’ll probably give those a try.

For another preview of the Elvis Cups, check out Patti at Candy Yum Yum.

Now comes the time where I share the wealth. Yes, you too can be the first on your block to try the new Elvis King Size Reese’s Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Cups. I’ll do a drawing on Saturday, June 16th at Noon Pacific ... the grand prize will be FIVE fresh packages. Just leave a comment here with your favorite Elvis tune or Elvis Cup sighting ... I’ve heard that they’re already showing up in stores like Dollar General. Use a real email address if you’d like me to contact you if you win, and I’d advise not checking the box for notification of comments, cuz there may be a few. I also reserve the right to throw more candy into the winner package, depending on my whim and inventory at the moment. North American addresses only.

(Ooh, thanks to the comments, I found this on the Hershey’s Gift Site, you can order them right now, a tin of 16 packages of the King Sized cups is $25.)

UPDATE: We have a winner (Lisa!) ... but you’re free to comment. If you’re looking for tips on where to find Elvis Cups, check out this post called Elvis Spotting.

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Hershey’s is offereing a new product line/service on their Hershey’s Gifts site: Fresh from the Factory.

You can now order selected products to be delivered fresh from the factory. If you live within a certain zone (see the map) you’ll actually have it within 96 hours of when it rolls off the production line.

Which leads me to wonder, does fresh candy taste better?

They’re offering Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Twizzlers (red & black), Good & Plenty and Payday Bars.

Hershey’s contacted me a couple of weeks ago asking if I’d like a taste ... I figured what the heck. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried fresh stuff from Hershey’s. I’m guessing that the candy that I’ve bought at Chocolate World is particularly fresh (especially the special trial items that they give out at the end of the Chocolate World ride), but other than that, I can only say that most of the stuff I eat is only fresh ... not factory fresh.

I’m already known to be a huge fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. So instead of just reviewing them, I thought I would pick up a package from the local grocery store to compare. The grocery store freshness code said 40HLV2 8C which means that the cups were good until March 2008. Sounds pretty fresh, too.

First, the look. The cups from the grocery store are .75 ounces each. The cups in the Fresh from the Factory jug were .55 ounces (not quite a miniature, not quite a full grown ... maybe I’ll call them juniors). The ingredients lists were exactly the same.

Grocery Store RPBC

The store-bought cup was good. The chocolate was cool on the tongue and sweet with a slight coconutty flavor. The peanut butter center was salty and nutty and though it’s not chunky and not creamy peanut butter, it’s slightly crumbly. If I could compare it to anything, it would be peanut butter cookie dough. Definitely a good associaiton.

Fresh from the Factory! RPBC

The FFTF Reese’s smelled overwhelmingly like peanut butter. There was not a trace of chocolate to the smell. The junior sized cups were even looking, and of the half a dozen or so I’ve eaten so far, not one had a physical flaw to it. The cups were completely unmarred by shipping damage.

The bite and snap are good. The chocolate is sweet and fresh, but the real difference here is in the peanut butter center. It feels fluffier. It tastes a little saltier and has a more intense and fresh peanut taste.

Are they that different ... if you put both in front of me and blindfolded me, could I tell the difference? Probaby. Do I prefer one over the other? Not really.

The price here is steep. $20 for 1 lbs 7 ounces. (I could buy the same amount of Reese’s for $6 at the grocery store.) The jar is nice, but made of clear plastic and not terribly special. It does a good job of storing the candies for easy access and opening it does deliver an incredibly mouth-watering aroma.

As a novelty or special occasion treat, I might indulge in this once a year if that’s when the roll around. May is a pretty dicey month to be shipping chocolate to Southern California though ... it was only through their good packaging (with a chill pack) and a respite from otherwise warm weather that kept these safe and tasty.

Of the list of other products on the list, I think the one that interests me most would be the Good & Plenty. I love Good & Plenty and suffer through the leathery chew quite often. I found last year that they now offer Good & Plenty in peg bags (I got mine on the Penna Turnpike on my way to my sister’s wedding). They were so fresh and chewy it was like I was eating a completely different candy.

If you’re a die hard fan of one of these candies, I think it’s definitely worth it for the experience. It also makes a great, inexpensive but special gift for the candy fan in your life. Graduation and Father’s Day are around the corner. Or perhaps a wedding couple you know have registered for it ... or should?

Patti at Candy Yum Yum also got her sample this weekend, have a look at what she says.

In my bargain hunting last weekend I was able to secure bags of the M&Ms Peanut Butter Speck-tacular Eggs and the Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs at rock bottom prices.

I picked up the M&Ms Peanut Butter Speck-tacular Eggs mostly because folks are still commenting on the Wonka Oompas (currently fruity) post lamenting the loss of the old Peanut Butter Oompas.

First, a rewind to the old Peanut Butter Oompas (see wrapper here) from Wonka. Introduced in 1972 after the film Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, they were larger than M&Ms but the same ovoid shape. The top half was peanut butter and the bottom half was mockolate then it was all covered with a crisp candy shell. (There may have been other flavor varieties.) The separation of the peanut butter and chocolate meant that you could cleave them in half in your teeth if you wanted, or suck the shell off and then melt away the chocolate creme to have only the stiff peanut butter left. I liked them and recall buying them rather often (there was no such thing as a Peanut Butter M&M at the time and Reese’s Pieces didn’t come along until 1978).

I was hoping that the larger format of the Speck-tacular Eggs would be similar to the old Oompas.

The normal M&Ms Peanut Butter have a core of peanut butter and a covering of milk chocolate then a shell. A little larger than a regular M&M, they average about the same size as a Peanut M&M. The Speck-Tacular Eggs are larger still and thus have a larger proportion of the peanut butter center since the chocolate coating seems about the same thickness.

It’s been at least thirty years since I’ve had the old Peanut Butter Oompas, so I can’t say that the Speck-Tacular Eggs are as good or even the same, but the proportions feel better to me. I’m going to say that this is the best modern day equivalent to the old Peanut Butter Oompas.

The other fun aquisition were the equally large Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs.

I don’t eat Reese’s Pieces much, though I do recall loving them as a kid. I used to buy bags of M&Ms and mix them with Reese’s Pieces. I could always pick the Reese’s Pieces out on my tongue by feel because their shells were ultrasmooth. (Ah, the ways I used to amuse myself.)

While the Speck-Tacular Eggs were rather uneven in size, the Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs are exceptionally regular. The colors are pretty much the same as the Hershey’s Pastel Eggs, though a little more egg shaped (with a pointier end).

The shells on the Reese’s Pieces Pastel Eggs are thicker than the regular Reese’s Pieces and provide a satisfying sharp crunch. The larger mass of peanut butter creme allowed me to really taste it. It has a slight floral taste to it and reminds me a bit of eating peanut butter cookie dough. Sweet with a little dash of salt. Pretty smooth and not as roasted tasting as the M&Ms Speck-Tacular Eggs.

I liked both varieties of eggs equally well. As appearances go, I preferred the Reese’s. But the freak-tacular price of only 52 cents for the Speck-Tacular Eggs is hard to argue with. They are both being added to my repertoire of Easter Candies to pick up at ridiculous prices.

Note: both products are certified Kosher.

Related Candies

1. Reese’s Whipps
2. Trader Joe’s Mini Peanut Butter Cups
3. Peanut Butter Kisses
4. Reese’s Pieces with Peanuts