For those unfamiliar, buckeyes are actually a fairly common and popular candy found in the Midwestern United States. The best way to describe them is to compare them to a chocolate covered peanut butter ball, only more often than not the centre of the treat is exposed leaving some peanut butter exposed. Sometimes candy companies will fill this hole with another filling, like white chocolate, but often it’s just the peanut butter exposed. On paper buckeyes seem like perfect treat. They combine chocolate and peanut butter, and they’re an easy mouthful. I don’t think I’ll understand the name entirely, but who am I to judge. There is however one problem that keeps coming up, and it’s the peanut butter.

When you sweeten peanut butter, you have to make sure to balance out the sweet and savoury just right. Unfortunately, these don’t really manage that balance. Instead, the peanut butter in these buckeyes seems to be a little overly sweet. The peanuts are also very smooth, which is a common thing in buckeyes, and I don’t really like it. I feel like a better buckeye might have a bit of a crunch texture to the peanut butter, maybe not like a crunch peanut butter, but more than the paste that you often find in buckeyes. I also feel like sweetening the peanut butter too much makes it overly sweet, particularly with the sweet milk chocolate.

Fortunately for these the chocolate is pretty great. It’s so smooth and melty that the batch I got was a bit of a mess. I can’t complain however since the alternative is to make a waxy chocolate that may look nicer, but doesn’t melt in your mouth or taste as good.

I did enjoy these buckeyes, but I just feel like there’s something missing in the texture. My instinct is that it needs some kind of crunch, but I’d be open for other ideas. Maybe that would ruin what a buckeye is supposed to be, but as far as being a tasty treat I feel like it just needs something else.