Written by Jonathan Wojcik
A NEW HALLOWEEN REESES.
I sure feel sorry for people who have never tasted a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Sorry, and confused. I understand if you live in a straw hut somewhere out in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle and live largely on a diet of crustaceans, or perhaps if you've a tendency to puff up and die when peanuts breach one of your orifices, but the rest of you have no excuses. None. A fundamental staple of my diet since early childhood, the filling of Reese's products traditionally tastes almost nothing whatsoever like "peanut butter," but what it does taste like is sweet, salty, crumbly ecstacy. It's exactly what angels would taste like when they're ground into a fine paste and entombed in milk chocolate.
As a fattening, chocolatey treat, Reese's are also a fundamental staple of Halloween, statistically almost every child's favorite trick-or-treating hand-out and available every year in their single best variation, the peanut butter pumpkin.
One of the most fascinating phenomena associated with Reese's cups is how widely, if subtly, they can vary in flavor according to their exact ratio of chocolate to "peanut butter." It's a phenomenon so well documented that a guy named Daniel Broadway and a Jonathan who somehow wasn't me performed a complicated experiment to determine exactly which size cup was the most delicious.
Now, they eventually settled on the "fun size" mini-cups, but I have to vehemently disagree. It is by far the pumpkins, with only a thin layer of chocolate over a thick cake of "peanut butter," whose flavor ratio is the most satisfying. I believe I had more than one hundred of them over the course of the last Halloween season.
To be fair, though, Reese's of every shape and size are all heavenly in their own unique and magical ways, from the minute mini-cups to the half-pound monoliths offered during some weird sort of fringe winter-time holiday. Again, every single one of them tastes amazingly different to the true Reese's-lover, and that's why I was incredibly excited to see not only a brand new variation, but a brand new Halloween variation. That's three great tastes that go great together!
This marvelous new development in chocolate peanut-butter-cup technology goes by no real name of its own; it's still just called a Reese's "Pumpkin," but there's no mistaking it for one of its smaller brethren.
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Such a smooth, flawless, cheerful chocolate Jack O' Lantern? This is the first Halloween Reese's I'm aware of that's ever had a sculpted face, which makes any Halloween confection immediately twice as enticing to sink your teeth, beak or barbed proboscis into, and it's not the only thing new and unusual about the super-pumpkin. Not by a long shot.
With the sole exception of one of their bar-shaped offerings, every Reese's I'm aware of houses its precious filling in a single, homogenous mass, but this abberation is compartmentalized, hiding at least six distinct cells of processed orgasm. Perhaps it's just to keep the whole thing from collapsing in on itself, because this isn't your ordinary Reese's peanut butter, either. This Reese's peanut butter is....no...
Can it be?
It's.... creamy?!
Creamy enough to be spreadable?!!
WHAT IS THIS GODLESS WIZARDRY!?
The contents of a Reese's cup have never, not ever been creamy like this. You can microwave one until the chocolate is like a delicious pool of angelic spunk, but the "peanut butter" will remain in a dense, crumbly loaf of angelic manure. This soft, gloppy formula is something I've possibly only encountered in small amounts, in some of the rarer products, and is neither a superior nor inferior experience. I'd never want it to replace the innards of the other cups, but it's at least interesting
And yes, this was the best damn open-faced peanut butter sandwich I have ever tasted. Why isn't this sold on its own? There's a "Reese's" brand of jarred peanut butter on the market, but that tastes like any other American peanut butter. This stuff, the giant chocolate pumpkin guts, actually retains the utterly unique, alien flavor of Reese's filling with more traditional peanut-buttery gooiness.
Just pump it into my veins already.
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