Moon Pie Peanut Butter

Product name: Moon Pie Peanut Butter
Purchase details: £1.50 for a pack of two pies (A Quarter of Sweets)
Calories: 170 per pie (340 per pack)
Country of origin: USA

If I’m honest, I’ve avoided Moon Pies up until now as the basic concept seems very similar to Wagon Wheels which, unfortunately, is a product I’ve never really enjoyed. However, throw peanut butter into the mix and the prospect of a Moon Pie became a very different matter! That’s why, when I found Moon Pie Peanut Butter in A Quarter of Sweets recently, I did not hesitate in snapping up a packet.

My love of peanut butter would have been enough to persuade me to buy this product even if everything else remained the same. However, instead of consisting of two graham cracker cookies and a marshmallow centre, Moon Pie Peanut Butter came described as ‘crunchy chocolate cookies’ filled with ‘creamy peanut butter’. Only the ‘chocolatey outside’ is present on both varieties of these sandwich biscuits.

I was pleased that these pies had a noticeable peanut butter smell which wasn’t too dissimilar to my beloved Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (see here), albeit milder and with a slight hint of biscuit. Looking at the two cookies, there was no mistaking the outer coating for real chocolate – it was very dark in colour and had a matt-looking surface with a slight oily and waxy feel. I found that the coating had no trouble melting between my fingers but didn’t seem to have the same effect in my mouth. It also didn’t seem to add much in terms of flavour so, given that it was encasing chocolate biscuits, this imitation coating wasn’t needed.

The biscuits themselves were very crunchy (the crumbs seemed to go everywhere!) and were nice, though not amazing. The smooth peanut butter filling added some moisture to these cookies, but I found the flavour to be a bit more sweet than nutty. However, it was still recognisably peanut butter, and it would have been nice for the biscuit to peanut butter ratio to have been slightly adjusted to allow the nuttiness of the creamy centre to seep through a bit more.

I am openly biased toward anything containing peanut butter so there was very little chance of me disliking this product. However, I can’t say I loved these enough to rave about them. I found the biscuits to be slightly too sweet whilst the peanut butter wasn’t salty enough, resulting in the contrast between the chocolate and peanut butter flavours not being great enough to create the perfect winning combination.

Appearance: 6.5/10
Aroma: 7/10
Taste: 7.5/10
Texture: 7/10
Overall score: 7/10