Reese's Pieces

Product name: Reese’s Pieces
Purchase details: £0.60 for a 43g bag or three for £1.20 (tesco.com)
Calories: 214 per bag
Country of origin: USA

I love Reese’s Pieces but I’d not had them in ages – the last time was as a birthday cake topping over 18 months ago so it was about time I had them again!

The ‘peanut butter candy in a crunchy shell’ used to be quite hard to find in the UK but, thankfully, it’s now a lot more widely available and I quite often see the eye-catching orange bags on shop shelves.

Made by the Hershey Company, these Pieces were a bit like M&M’s but with peanut butter instead of chocolate, and the brown, orange and yellow colours used reflected the branding of the Peanut Butter Cups.

The pale candy centres made up 62% of the product and produced a fairly nutty scent, although this wasn’t pure. They had a lovely peanut butter flavour but, since it had been solidified, it lacked the squidgy texture of ordinary peanut butter.

The shells made up the remainder of the Pieces and these were really sugary – an aspect that was particularly noticeable when sucking. These casings worked really well with the centres, merging crisp and soft textures nicely, although the peanut butter candy didn’t stay in one piece when chewing in the way that chocolate would...it almost had a crumbly feel to it. In terms of taste, though, the Pieces certainly didn’t lack the chocolate, and the flavour was still nice and sweet. In fact, the sweet and salty aspects played off each other perfectly and seemed to create a mini party in my mouth, producing a kind of juiciness too.

I also loved how the bag seemed to last for ages, and that the sweets tasted great individually and in handfuls. They were so addictive that I think I could actually live off them! I definitely need to make them a more regular purchase...

Appearance: 8/10
Aroma: 6/10
Taste: 8.5/10
Texture: 7.5/10
Overall score: 7.5/10