I was skeptical about these Pieces from Reese’s. Of the many classic candies that offer varieties, it seems that Reese's Pieces is the one that's avoided the weird varieties more than most. There have been several candies that have featured Reese's Pieces as an extra ingredient, but I can't say that I remember there ever been an actual change to the Pieces themselves. You could sit on two sides of a fence on this subject. You could say that they're a classic, and it's nice that they didn't mess with anything. You could also say that they're behind the times, and not jumping on the huge trend and changing things up a bit. I'm somewhere in the middle of this debate, but the older I get the more I seem to lean towards not changing anything. That's probably why I was skeptical of this new variety.
I think I might have also been skeptical because I really couldn't see the point. Why would you put a peanut inside a candy that's just a candy shell filled with peanut butter. It's as if they wanted to make a crunchy peanut butter variety, but the peanut crusher broke so they just put in a full nut. It's a really strange concept. Having said that, it's a pretty sure thing that a peanut will work with the ingredients flavour wise. After all we know the flavour combination works, because it's pretty much exactly the same flavour combination as the original. If anything this is exclusively a texture thing. The interesting thing is, it kind of worked.
There's something really satisfying about crunching into the nut. It adds something to Reese's Pieces that wasn't there before. While I mentioned before that it's just adding more of the same ingredient, I might have been a little bit wrong. The peanut butter that they use in Reese's Pieces contains sugar, so they can sometimes come off as a little sweet. The peanut however balances out the sweetness a bit and gives it a slightly nutty flavour. So really it's a bit of a double win.
I really didn't want to like these, I wanted to mock the idea a bit, but frankly they work fairly well, and I could easily eat a bag of these on a nice sunny day.